Well I had a fine collection of rants building up in me and I was looking forward to spending some time unloading them onto you. But gentle reader, should one such exist, I have spent an entire day fighting yet another battle to maintain the technology in operation. This was a matter of considerable emergency and importance, as my wife’s technology had also ceased to function. The consequences could have been life threatening. To me!

Many of life’s problems are caused by the tendency of companies to swallow other companies. Our ISP of many years was swallowed in such a way, forcing us to change our email addresses at some inconvenience. That wouldn’t have mattered so much except that the new company were a tad casual in their billing processes, so that little random extra charges began to appear. This eventually led me to contact the telecoms ombudsman, who supported my claim to change to a new supplier, with no penalty charge.

Fine, the new supplier is excellent but it required another address change. I had noticed that a friend had acquired a domain name, and thus his address was independent of any ISP, so I too obtained a domain name. All went well for a while and I used an email service linked to the domain name. But then the host company decided to hugely increase the cost of the email service, so I relocated the domain name. But I used a different supplier for the email service – and they were recently swallowed by another company. They had just emailed me to warn me of the need to change the email server addresses in my email client.

But, although I carefully entered the new server addresses into my email client and, with extreme difficulty and tedium, into my wife’s Outlook account, no email was forthcoming. Fortunately the new company has a quite excellent and responsive support organisation, who were able to unravel the situation and advise me that I also needed (as I ought to have known) to change the addressing on the domain host’s site to point to the new email hosting service.

So another day for which I had much planned – some of which was a spillover from what I had intended to do yesterday – has almost passed. I have nether time nor energy left to write that which I had intended but I will leave you with a couple of things to reflect on.

1. I note with interest that lawyers have detected a fine new source of income in the potential prosecution and defence of people who use the freedom of the Internet to criticise others. Oh I see the dead hand of politics in this too but the lawyers will be the ones to grow fat on it. I had intended to say a little about lawyers and the harm that they create in society in my rantings but I will save the details of that for another day.
2. I see that the term ‘Deniers’ is right up there with ‘Heretic’ and ‘Infidel’ – someone who disagrees with us and should therefore be set on fire or beheaded. This is a sure sign that the accusers can produce no rational explanation for their beliefs but are desperate to prevent others from recognising that they are just deluded idiots.

So little time, so many better things to do, but I think it’s about time to write a bit more.

The other day a friend spoke about the manner of speech of the Australian character Bazza McKenzie, who used to appear in a strip cartoon in one of the London evening papers, the Evening Standard, I think. I believe Bazza was invented by Barry Humphries, long before Dame Edna Everage sprang, fully Melbourne Middle Aged, onto our TV screens.

My friend quoted Bazza’s immortal words, used to describe a person of the parsimonious persuasion:

‘Wouldn’t piss in yer ear if yer brain was on fire’.

And my friend said how he was so impressed by this no-nonsense delivery that he decided that here in Australia was where he wanted to be – and indeed is and has been for many years.

Sadly, to my despair, that Australia is all but gone. Currently there is uproar amongst what John Howard memorably labelled ‘The Chattering Classes’ because some schoolboys loudly bellowed out a scurrilous ditty on a crowded tram. But it is those same people who have so neutered our society that no adult dare intervene for fear of the full weight of judicial wrath being visited upon him – or her. Oh what bliss to hear someone being congratulated for clouting one – or more – of the little bastards; but it ain’t gonna happen folks.

In my youth, if I’d done anything like that, the nearest adult would have given me a thick ear and my father, if he heard about it, would have given me a thicker one – if mum hadn’t got one in first! My sincere thanks, shades of mum and dad, you turned me into someone worth being.

Now for a go at the economy – something else of which I despair. The gummint wants us to spend more, to get the economy working. It also claims to ‘Create New Jobs’ although, since it has no productive function, these can only be more non-productive paper shufflers for the workers to support. Now the workers are so badly paid that they are already spending all of their income just to survive. So who is going to spend more? Well, The Rich, stupid; there’s nobody else. So offer the rich tax breaks if they spend. It ain’t rocket science. 4% off your total tax bill for every million you spend on luxury goods; they’d love it. I’m sure a competent economist (is that a tautology?) can calculate the most effective percentage.

And who was the clown who invented penalising employers for employing? Yes, Payroll Tax; the finest incentive to reduce your workforce by any and every means ever invented. Why not reduce the employer’s tax bill for everyone employed. Haven’t you noticed – all those extra people will be paying tax, so you increase employment and don’t even lose by it. And they will go out and spend.

And now I fear that my brain may be about to catch fire and, in our prissy, politically correct, totally inhibited society, not even the most well intentioned Aussie will dare to piss in my ear.

Confession time; I have been totally sucked in by the Climate Change scam – going around talking like a true believer without bothering to check the authenticity of the many talking heads spruiking this fable. I am still a supporter of renewable power sources and will probably write a bit about those later but for now I want to concentrate on an article to which my, less easily hoodwinked, wife has drawn my attention.

I want you to read this article as I think that the composition of the body that has published it and the meticulous reference bibliography provided by the author  leave no doubt as to the reliability of the document and its conclusions. I am particularly appalled by the part that BBC TV is shown to have played in this deception – although, having in the distant past has some glimpse of the underbelly of that organisation’s White City studios, I am not altogether surprised.

I also had a small part in the developing Nuclear power industry in the UK when, in common with many others, I believed that we were creating the answer to the country’s forthcoming power needs. That was in the 1950’s and, so far as I am aware, nuclear power generation has yet to make any significant contribution there. I mention this simply because ‘Climate Change’ is being used as a reason to suggest nuclear power development in Australia – something that I regard as most undesirable and now see as totally unnecessary.

Please be patient; it took me two days to read through the article and study the many references. It is not trivial. I had hoped to simply include here the url used to download my own pdf but I cannot get it to work again. I have therefore been obliged to copy and paste the pdf, making it less attractive to read. My apologies – it really is worth the struggle though.

One more comment; I see from comments on the GWPF website that, despite the rigour of the article, some people are still so totally brainwashed that they can only make scathing comments. Confirmation of the malignant power of Groupthink.

GLOBAL WARMING
A case study in groupthink
How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time
Christopher Booker
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
GWPF Report 28GWPF REPORTS
Views expressed in the publications of the Global Warming Policy Foundation
are those of the authors, not those of the GWPF, its Academic Advisory Council members or its directors
THE GLOBAL WARMING POLICY FOUNDATION
Director
Benny Peiser
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Lord Lawson (Chairman)
Lord Donoughue
Lord Fellowes
Rt Revd Dr Peter Forster, Bishop of Chester
Sir Martin Jacomb
ACADEMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL
Professor Christopher Essex (Chairman)
Sir Samuel Brittan
Sir Ian Byatt
Dr John Constable
Professor Vincent Courtillot
Professor Freeman Dyson
Christian Gerondeau
Professor Larry Gould
Professor William Happer
Professor David Henderson
Professor Terence Kealey
Professor Deepak Lal
Professor Richard Lindzen
CREDITS
Cover image The Blind Leading the Blind
©Aleutie/Shutterstock
Peter Lilley
Charles Moore
Baroness Nicholson
Graham Stringer MP
Lord Turnbull
Professor Ross McKitrick
Professor Robert Mendelsohn
Professor Garth Paltridge
Professor Ian Plimer
Professor Paul Reiter
Dr Matt Ridley
Sir Alan Rudge
Professor Nir Shaviv
Professor Henrik Svensmark
Professor Anastasios Tsonis
Professor Fritz Vahrenholt
Dr David Whitehouse

GLOBAL WARMING
A case study in groupthink
How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time
Christopher Booker
ISBN 978-0-9931190-0-2
© Copyright 2018 The Global Warming Policy FoundationContents
Foreword vii
About the author viii
Author’s personal note viii
Executive summary xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Janis’s theory of groupthink 2
3 The three rules of groupthink 3
4 The power of second-hand thinking 5
5 Global warming and the archetype of groupthink 6
6 The ‘idea whose time had come’ 18
7 The IPCC breaks its own rules: the ‘consensus’ survives its first major
scandal 20
8 The ‘consensus’ fudges the evidence 23
9 When groupthink meets the outside world 26
10 The ‘consensus’ and the media 31
11 Hysteria reaches its height 35
12 The story begins to change: dissenting voices 38
13 Groupthink and wishful thinking 44
14 Where did the ‘consensus’ get its ‘facts’? 49
15 Groupthink defends its own 52
16 Aftermath of the crisis, 2010–2014 54
17 Prelude to Paris: ‘adjusting’ the facts to fit the theory (again) 67
v18 Paris 2015: a final ‘triumph’ for groupthink 70
19 The real global warming disaster: how groupthink shaped the po-
litical response 74
20 The peculiar case of the United Kingdom 76
21 President Trump finally calls the groupthink’s bluff 80
22 Conclusions: what happens when the groupthink does meet reality? 82
23 A personal epilogue: the wider picture
Foreword
By Professor Richard Lindzen
The bizarre issue of climate catastrophism has been around sufficiently long that it
has become possible to trace its history in detail, and, indeed, several excellent re-
cent books do this, placing the issue in the context of a variety of environmental,
economic and political trends. Darwall’s Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots
of the Climate Industrial Complex and Lewin’s Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The
Origins of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deserve special mention in
this connection. Booker’s relatively brief monograph asks a rather different but pro-
foundly important question. Namely, how do otherwise intelligent people come to
believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, con-
tradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications. Booker con-
vincingly shows the power of ‘groupthink’ to overpower the rational faculties that we
would hope could play some role. The phenomenon of groupthink helps explain why
ordinary working people are less vulnerable to this defect. After all, the group that the
believers want to belong to is that of the educated elite. This may have played a ma-
jor role in the election of Donald Trump, which depended greatly on the frustration
of the non-elites (or ‘deplorables’, as Hillary Clinton referred to them) with what they
perceived to be the idiocy of their ‘betters’.
Booker’s emphasis on the situation in the UK is helpful insofar as there is nowhere
that the irrationality of the response to this issue has been more evident, but the
problem exists throughout the developed world. The situation everywhere has been
reinforced by the existence of numerous individuals and groups that have profited
mightily from the hysteria (including academia, where funding predicated on sup-
porting alarm has increased by a factor of about 15–20 in the US), but why so many
others have gone along, despite the obvious disadvantages of doing so, deserves the
attention that Booker provides.
Professor Lindzen was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Masschusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 2013. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of GWPF.
About the author
Christopher Booker has been writing on climate change and energy issues in the Sun-
day Telegraph and elsewhere over the past 11 years. In 2010 his history of the science
and politics of global warming, The Real Global Warming Disaster: is the obsession with
climate change turning into one of the most costly scientific blunders in history? was
ranked by The Bookseller as one of the UK’s three top best-selling books on the envi-
ronment in the previous decade, alongside titles by Al Gore and James Lovelock.
Born in 1937, he read history at Cambridge and was the founding editor of Private
Eye between 1961 and 1963. His other books have included The Neophiliacs: a study of
the revolution in English life in the Fifties and Sixties (1969), The Seven Basic Plots: why tell stories, a psychological analysis of storytelling (2004), The Great Deception, a history
of the European Union (co-written with Dr Richard North), and Scared to Death: Why
scares are costing us the earth (2007). In 1979 he made an acclaimed BBC television
documentary, City of Towers, tracing the crucial influence of Le Corbusier on the post-
war redevelopment of Britain’s cities.
Author’s personal note
Having now written extensively about the global warming issue for over a decade, I
kick myself that I did not discover the book that inspired this paper until 2014. When
I finally came across Irving Janis’s seminal analysis of ‘groupthink’, I realised just how
much more it helped to explain about the story I and many others had been following
for so long.
In particular, if I had known about it when in 2009 I published my history of the
great alarm over manmade climate change, The Real Global Warming Disaster, it might
have been a very different book.
Here, more briefly, I look at that story again, brought up to date, but this time
showing how Janis’s theory adds a whole new dimension to our understanding of
one of the most remarkable and puzzling episodes in the history of both science and
politics.
viii It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can
be understood how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those
which are imposed upon them.
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd
As long as one is within a certain phenomenology, one is not astonished and no
one wonders what it is all about. Such philosophical doubt only comes to one who
is outside the game.
C.G. Jung, Psychology and National Problems
ixExecutive summary
By any measure, the belief that the earth faces an unprecedented threat from ‘human-
induced climate change’ has been one of the most extraordinary episodes in the his-
tory of either science or politics. It has led scientists and politicians to contemplate
nothing less than a complete revolution in the way mankind sources the energy re-
quired to keep modern industrial civilisation functioning, by phasing out the fossil-
fuels on which that civilisation has been built.
But for 30 years the way this has all come about has given expert observers cause
for increasing puzzlement. In particular they have questioned:
• the speed with which the belief that human carbon dioxide emissions were
causing the world dangerously to warm came to be proclaimed as being shared
by a ‘consensus’ of the world’s climate scientists;
• the nature and reliability of much of the evidence being cited to support that
belief;
• the failure of global temperatures to rise in accordance with the predictions of
the computer models on which the ‘consensus’ ultimately rested.
But there was also the peculiarly hostile and dismissive nature of the response by
supporters of the ‘consensus’ to those who questioned all this, a group that included
many eminent scientists and other experts.
The purpose of this paper is to use the scientific insights of a professor of psychol-
ogy at Yale back in the 1970s to show the entire story of the alarm over global warm-
ing in a remarkable new light. The late Professor Irving Janis analysed what happens
when people get caught up in what he termed ‘groupthink’, a pattern of collective
psychological behaviour with three distinctive features, that we can characterise as
rules.
• A group of people come to share a particular view or belief without a proper
appraisal of the evidence.
• This leads them to insist that their belief is shared by a ‘consensus’ of all right-
minded opinion.
• Because their belief is ultimately only subjective, resting on shaky foundations,
they then defend it only by displaying an irrational, dismissive hostility towards
anyone daring to question it.
This paper begins by showing how strongly all these three symptoms were in ev-
idence, right from the start, when, in the late 1980s, the belief that a rise in carbon
dioxide levels was causing the earth dangerously to warm was first brought to the
world’s attention.
It shows how the rules of groupthink continued to be in evidence when, dur-
ing the period around the first report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
xiChange (IPCC) in 1990 and the Rio ‘Earth Summit’ of 1992, global warming became
adopted as an international scientific and political ‘consensus’.
The presence of groupthink was confirmed at Kyoto in 1997, when practical steps
were first agreed to slow down the rise in world temperatures, by means that would
require the richer, developed nations of the West to reduce their carbon dioxide emis-
sions, while allowing the still ‘developing’ nations, such as China and India, to con-
tinue increasing them until their economies had caught up with the West. Eventually,
as the paper will show, this division between the West and the rest of the world would
turn out to be the crux of the whole story,
For some years the ‘consensus’ theory continued to seem plausible, as carbon
dioxide levels and global temperatures continued to rise together, just as the com-
puter models on which the ‘consensus’ relied had predicted. In 1998 temperatures
were the highest on record, coinciding with an unusually strong El Niño event in the
Pacific.
But then came the ‘hockey stick’ controversy, which first drew charges that, to
make their case seem more plausible, supporters of the ‘consensus’ – strongly en-
dorsed by the IPCC – were having to manipulate crucial scientific evidence. Their re-
sponse to these allegations was further evidence of Janis’s third rule, that any attempt
to challenge the ‘consensus’ must be ignored, rejected and suppressed.
Between 2004 and 2007, the ‘consensus’ still seemed to carry all before it, as its
claims for the threat posed to the planet by global warming became ever more exag-
gerated and extreme, as exemplified in Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth
and the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.
But it was at this time that more serious cracks began to appear in the ‘consen-
sus’ case. There had been the continuing failure, since the El Niño year of 1998, of
global temperatures to rise as the computer models had predicted: this was what
became known as ‘the hiatus’ or ‘the pause’. There were telling examples of how irra-
tionally supporters of the ‘consensus’ had reacted when they were, for the first time,
confronted by world-ranking scientists who were outside the groupthink.
Even more important, there was the emergence through the internet of a new
‘counter-consensus’, led by technical experts qualified to challenge every scientific
claim on which the ‘consensus’ relied. It was this which, in accordance with Janis’s
third rule, prompted supporters of the ‘consensus’ to vilify anyone daring to disagree
with them as just ‘climate deniers’ who were ‘anti-science’.
In 2009/2010, the ‘consensus’ suffered its three most damaging blows yet:
• the release of the Climategate emails between the little group of scientists at
the heart of the IPCC establishment;
• the collapse in Copenhagen of the long-planned bid to agree a new global cli-
mate treaty, again essentially because of a division between developing nations
and the West;
xii• a series of scandals that revealed that the most widely-quoted and alarming
claims in the 2007 IPCC report had not been based on science at all, but on
claims made in press releases and false reports put out by climate activists.
On both the Climategate emails and the IPCC scandals the ‘climate establishment’
did all it could to hold the line, with a series of supposedly ‘independent’ inquiries
staged by its supporters. But the damage had been done. Between 2010 and 2014,
despite efforts by supporters of the ‘consensus’, such as the BBC and the UK Met Office,
to keep the alarm going, it became clear that it was no longer possible to sustain the
hysteria that had reached its climax in the years before Copenhagen.
But then, as this paper shows, came what amounted to a last throw by the ‘consen-
sus’, with the approach of yet another major global climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The prelude to this, coinciding with another record El Niño event in 2015/2016, was
such a rise in global temperatures as to prompt claims that ‘the pause’ had ended.
But expert analysts across the world found that wholesale ‘adjustments’ had been
made to the figures in the main surface temperature records, giving an impression
that the global temperature trend had been rising much more than was justified by
the original recorded data.
Then came an event as significant as any since the alarm over global warming had
first arisen. Documents supplied by every country before the Paris conference, known
as INDCs, or ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’, set out their intended
future energy policies. Buried in technical details, these made clear that, however
much the countries of the West might be planning to reduce their ‘carbon’ emissions,
the rest of the world, led by China and India, was planning by 2030 to build enough
fossil-fuel power stations to increase global emissions by almost 50 percent. China
was intending to double its emissions, India to triple theirs.
In other words, the rest of the world had no intention of going along with the de-
clared aim of Paris, to agree on the wholesale ‘decarbonisation’ of the world’s econ-
omy. Yet astonishingly, so lost were developed countries in the groupthink that the
Western media failed to recognise what was happening.
One person who did was President Trump who, to the fury of all those still blinded
by the groupthink, gave the refusal of the rest of the world to reduce its carbon diox-
ide emissions as his reason for pulling the US out of the Paris Accord (although even
now this was not picked up by those reporting on his decision in the West).
Before coming to its conclusions, this paper will briefly summarise some of the
immense political consequences of the alarm over global warming: the costs and
futility of the steps being taken, chiefly in the West, to switch from fossil fuels to ‘low-
carbon’ sources of energy.
The conclusions then follow, under three headings. The first summarises the na-
ture of the groupthink that has for 30 years come to dominate virtually all public dis-
cussion of global warming in the West. The second considers the factors that will
xiiimake it so difficult for the West to escape from this intellectual straitjacket.
But the final section highlights how the events of the past two years, culminating
in Trump’s rejection of Paris, have in fact been the crux of the whole story. The rest
of the world, led by the fast-growing economies of China and India, has made clear
that, whatever the West may continue to believe or do, it is carrying on regardless.
This was what Trump recognised when, in July 2017, he finally called the bluff of one
of the most damaging examples of groupthink the world has ever known. From now
on, the story can never be the same again.
xiv1 Introduction
Since we have now been living with the debate on global warming for 30 years, it
might seem hard to imagine that any wholly new scientific perspective could usefully
be brought to bear on it. But such is the purpose of this paper, which seeks to use the
insights of a distinguished former professor of psychology at Yale to show the real
nature of that debate in a startling new light, helping us to understand much that
observers have long found baffling.
By any measure, the consequences of the belief that human activity may be caus-
ing our planet dangerously to warm have marked it as one of the most extraordinary
episodes in history. Countless billions of dollars gone into attempts to confirm the
theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pos-
ing an unprecedented threat to the future of life on Earth. This idea has been found so
persuasive by many of the world’s politicians that they have been prepared to commit
us to spending trillions more on every kind of measure designed to avert that threat.
Their central aim has been, as they put it, to ‘decarbonise’ the world’s economy.
They want us to phase out the fossil-fuels on which mankind’s material progress has
been based for 200 years, and to rely instead on ‘carbon-free’ sources of energy, such
as ‘renewables’ and nuclear power. Together, they believe, this will bring about such
a reduction in human emissions of carbon dioxide that it will have a significant influ-
ence on the earth’s climate.
This, of course, is why the warming thesis has become so hugely important to all
our futures: it has led to the widely accepted view that our planet can only be saved
by a fundamental revolution in the way the human race manages its affairs, based on
eliminating precisely those sources of energy on which our modern industrial civili-
sation has been built.
But there has long been a very serious puzzle at the heart of how the discussion of
all this has unfolded. From the moment these views exploded to the top of the global
agenda in the late 1980s, they might have seemed to carry all before them. But right
from the start, a number of reputable scientists found them far from convincing or
well-founded. Yet so powerful was the momentum behind what had almost imme-
diately been proclaimed as a ‘consensus’ of scientific opinion that any questioning of
it was swept aside.
Over the years other experts emerged to challenge not just the ‘consensus’ it-
self, but the methods being used to promote it: not least the graphs and predictions
produced by those computer models which were so central to the case for anthro-
pogenic warming. Equally questioned were the methods being adopted by politi-
cians to counter the supposed threat, such as pouring colossal subsidies into new
sources of ‘zero-carbon’ energy.
But however authoritatively many of these attempts to question the ‘consensus’
were put, they were automatically dismissed as scarcely worth answering. In other
1words, the most obvious characteristic of the supposed ‘debate’ over climate change
was that it was never really a debate at all.
There was never any proper engagement between the two sides, because the
supporters of the ‘consensus’, who included all the world’s major scientific institutions
and most of the media, simply could not accept that any further discussion was called
for. Scarcely had the story begun than we were repeatedly told that ‘the science is set-
tled’.
For many observers, however, there was something very odd about this: not just
the absence of dialogue between the two sides, but the peculiar hostility shown by
supporters of the ‘consensus’ towards anyone who did not share their view. This was
not what might have been expected over what was, on any count, one of the most
significant issues of the age. So what might explain it? Was there perhaps some clue in
human psychology which might help better to explain the extraordinarily one-sided
nature of this ‘non-debate’?
At this point, step forward Irving Janis, a professor of psychology at Yale University
in the 1970s, the man who has given us the crucial missing perspective that may allow
us to see this familiar story in a wholly new light.
2
Janis’s theory of groupthink
I use the term ‘groupthink’ as a quick and easy way to refer to a mode of thinking
that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when
the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically
appraise alternative courses of action. Groupthink is a term of the same order as
the words in the newspeak vocabulary George Orwell presents in his dismaying
1984 – a vocabulary with terms such as ‘doublethink’ and ‘crimethink’. By putting
groupthink with those Orwellian words, I realise that groupthink takes on an
Orwellian connotation. The invidiousness is intentional, Groupthink refers to a
deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgment.
Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 1972
Janis’s unique contribution to science lay in his disciplined analysis of what happens
when human beings get caught up in an instance of what he called ‘groupthink’. Of
course, this is a word now casually used all over the place, to dismiss the shared mind-
set of any group of people with whose opinions one doesn’t agree. And Janis himself
did not originate the term, which is attributed to William Whyte Jr. in 1952. But Ja-
nis minted it afresh by consciously adapting it from George Orwell’s ‘doublethink’ in
Nineteen Eighty-Four. And what made his contribution so valuable was that, in his
book Victims of Groupthink in 1972 (in a later edition shortened to just Groupthink ), 1
2he showed that there is a scientific structure to the rules by which groupthink consis-
tently operates.
In fact the only reason why his book is not much better known is that he does not
himself seem to have been aware of how much more generally relevant his insights
were than to just the subject of his original study. The subtitle of his book was A Psy-
chological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascos, and the examples he used to
illustrate his thesis were all notorious failures of US foreign policy between the 1940s
and the 1960s. These included the failure of America to heed intelligence warnings
of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, General McArthur’s fateful decision
to advance into North Korea in 1950, President Kennedy’s backing for the CIA’s disas-
trous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and President Johnson’s decision in 1965 to
escalate the war in Vietnam. In a later edition he added President Nixon’s involvement
in the Watergate affair.
But what Janis more generally showed through each of his carefully researched
case studies was how this form of collective human psychology operates according
to certain clearly identifiable rules. Janis several times set out lists of the ‘symptoms
of groupthink’, and his lengthy study included much analysis of its other attributes.
But for our present purpose, we can draw out from his work three characteristics of
groupthink that are absolutely basic and relevant to our theme. I carefully use here
the phrase ‘draw out from’ because Janis himself nowhere explicitly states that these
are the three basic rules of groupthink. But they are implicit in his analysis throughout
the book, and form the core of his theory as to how groupthink operates.
3 The three rules of groupthink
Rule one is that a group of people come to share a common view or belief that in some
way is not properly based on reality. They may believe they have all sorts of evidence
that confirms that their opinion is right, but their belief cannot ultimately be tested
in a way that confirms this beyond doubt. In essence, therefore, it is no more than a
shared belief.
Rule two is that, precisely because their shared view cannot be subjected to ex-
ternal proof, they then feel the need to reinforce its authority by elevating it into a
‘consensus’, a word Janis himself emphasised. To those who subscribe to the ‘con-
sensus’, the common belief seems intellectually and morally so self-evident that all
right-thinking people must agree with it. The one thing they cannot afford to allow
is that anyone, either within their group or outside it, should question or challenge it.
Once established, the essence of the belief system must be defended at all costs.
Rule three, in some ways the most revealing of all, is a consequence of that in-
sistence that everyone must support the ‘consensus’. The views of anyone who fails
to share it become wholly unacceptable. There cannot be any possibility of dialogue
3with them. They must be excluded from any further discussion. At best they may just
be marginalised and ignored, at worst they must be openly attacked and discredited.
Dissent cannot be tolerated.
Janis showed how consistently and fatally these rules operated in each of his ex-
amples. Those caught up in the groupthink rigorously excluded anyone putting for-
ward evidence that raised doubts about their ‘consensus’ view. So convinced were
they of the rightness of their cause that anyone failing to agree with it was aggres-
sively shut out from the discussion. And in each case, because they refused to con-
sider any evidence that suggested that their two-dimensional ‘consensus’ was not
based on a proper appraisal of reality, it eventually led to disaster.
The collective refusal to heed intelligence warnings allowed the Japanese to at-
tack Pearl Harbour with impunity. McArthur’s hubristic decision to advance into North
Korea predictably brought China into the war, with deadly results. The reckless ac-
ceptance by Kennedy and his little circle of intimate advisers of a crackpot CIA plan
to invade Cuba led inevitably to an embarrassing fiasco. The massive stepping up of
US forces in Vietnam produced a response that was to suck the US into ten years of
frustration and a growing nightmare, which only ended with their humiliating with-
drawal in 1975.
But Janis then followed this litany of failure with two examples of US foreign policy
initiatives that provided a complete contrast: the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s and
the ending of the Cuban missile crisis, which had threatened a new world war in 1962.
He showed how the difference had been that these initiatives were driven by the very
opposite of groupthink. In each case, those responsible had deliberately canvassed
the widest range of expert opinion, to ensure that all relevant evidence was brought
to the table. They wanted to explore every possible consequence of what was being
proposed. And in each case the policy was outstandingly successful.
Once we recognise how these three elements make up the archetypal rules that
define the operations of groupthink, we see just how very much more generally they
have applied, in different guises, all down the ages.
An obvious example comes in the shape of most forms of organised religion. Reli-
gions are, by definition, ‘belief systems’, which, once established, have tended to be-
come very markedly intolerant of anyone who does not share them. These outsiders
are therefore condemned as ‘heretics’, ‘infidels’, and ‘unbelievers’. To protect the right-
thinking orthodoxy, they must be marginalised, excluded from mainstream society,
persecuted, even put to death.
Another obvious instance has been those totalitarian political ideologies, such as
communism or Nazism, that likewise showed ruthless intolerance towards ‘subver-
sives’, ‘dissidents’ or anyone not following ‘the party line’ (in the Soviet Union it was
termed ‘correct thinking’). Again, such people had to be excluded from established
society, imprisoned or physically ‘eliminated’.
4Once we recognise this pattern, we can easily identify countless other examples,
large and small, throughout history; from the treatment accorded to Galileo for ques-
tioning the Church’s ‘consensus’ that the sun moved round the earth to the hysteria
whipped up in the USA in the early1950s by McCarthy and the Senate Un-American
Activities Committee, against anyone who could be demonised as a ‘communist’ and
therefore a traitor.
A perfect fictional depiction of groupthink in action is Hans Christian Andersen’s
story The Emperor’s New Clothes. When the emperor parades through the streets in
what he has been talked into imagining is a dazzling new suit, all his deferential sub-
jects acclaim it as handsome beyond compare. Only the little boy points out that the
emperor is not wearing any clothes at all, and is stark naked. And, of course, those
caught up in the ‘consensus’ all viciously turn on him for pointing out the truth.
In the epilogue I shall refer briefly to other instances of groupthink that have be-
come only too familiar in our present-day world. But before we apply Janis’s three
rules to the ‘non-debate’ over global warming, we must also add one more very im-
portant aspect of the way groupthink operates which he didn’t touch on, because it
wasn’t relevant to the particular examples he was analysing.
4 The power of second-hand thinking
Great power is given to ideas propagated by affirmation, repetition and contagion
by the circumstances that they acquire in time that mysterious force known as
‘prestige’. Whatever has been a ruling power in the world, whether it be ideas or
men, has in the main enforced its authority by means of that irresistible force we
call prestige.
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd
Janis was only really concerned with how groupthink affected small groups of peo-
ple in charge of US policy at the highest level. But when we come to consider the
story of the belief in man-made global warming, we are of course looking at how this
was shared by countless other people: academics, politicians, the media, teachers,
business executives, indeed public opinion in general.
But all these people only got carried along by the belief that manmade global
warming was real and dangerous because they had been told it was so by others.
They accepted as true what they had heard, read or just seen on television without
questioning it. And this meant that they didn’t really know why they thought why
they did. They hadn’t thought it necessary to give such a complicated and technical
subject any fundamental study. They simply echoed what had been passed on to
them from somewhere else, usually in the form of a few familiar arguments or articles
of belief that were, like approved mantras, endlessly repeated.
5Of course, we all accept a huge proportion of what we believe or think we know
without bothering to check the reliability of whatever source we first learned it from,
such as the idea that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, or that Tokyo is the
capital of Japan. We just take on trust that such things are true because everyone else
does so, and assume that, if necessary, they can be confirmed by hard evidence.
But when it came to the belief in man-made global warming, another factor was at
work, one which always becomes relevant when we are looking at any case of group-
think. Because this was a wholly new idea, its acceptance rested on how much author-
ity could be attributed to those putting it forward, and this was to become a crucial
part of the story.
Long before Janis came up with his theory of groupthink, similar ideas had been
explored in less scientific form by the French writer Gustave Le Bon, who in 1895 pub-
lished a book called The Crowd. And one of his shrewdest observations was the crucial
part played in changing the opinions of huge numbers of people by ‘prestige’: the
particular deference paid to those who are taking the lead in putting them forward.
This was never more evident than in the way the belief in manmade global warm-
ing came to win such widespread acceptance. The most obvious example was the
unique prestige accorded to the body known as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). The prestige of the IPCC lay in the fact that it was presented to
the world as the ultimate objective authority on the state of the earth’s climate, rep-
resenting the views of all the world’s ‘top climate scientists’. If other scientists, politi-
cians, journalists or anyone else wished to make a point about global warming, they
only had to cite the IPCC as their authority. Its pronouncements were to be treated as
gospel. And even these people borrowed a little of the IPCC’s authority by the very
fact that they were quoting it.
But how did the IPCC come to be given such unparalleled authority in the first
place? This becomes highly relevant when we look at how closely the rise of the belief
in global warming and all that followed from it was shaped by Janis’s three basic rules.
5
Global warming and the archetype of groupthink
We start by re-examining how the belief in man-made global warming first came
about.
Rule 1: The creation of a belief-system
One of the most striking features of this belief was the dramatic suddenness with
which it was sprung upon the world. The story began in obscurity in the late 1970s,
when a tiny group of international meteorologists, led by Professor Bert Bolin from
Sweden, observed that global temperatures, after 30 years of modest decline, were
once again rising. In fact, Bolin had initially become convinced as far back as the late
61950s that a rise in carbon dioxide must inevitably, thanks to the properties of carbon
dioxide as a greenhouse gas, lead to global warming, at a time when such a theory
was wholly out of fashion. By the early 1970s, after three decades when global tem-
peratures had been in such decline that many scientists were predicting the approach
of a new ice age, Bolin was regarded as just an eccentrically marginal figure. 2
But by the late 1970s, he noted that not only were levels of carbon dioxide rising,
so also once again were temperatures. This confirmed for him that the two must be
directly connected, the first leading to the second. And the possible consequences
for the future of mankind, he concluded, were distinctly alarming. 3
When, in 1979, Bolin put his case to the first ever ‘World Climate Conference’,
staged in Geneva under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (the
WMO), it seemed to his audience so convincing that it was agreed that a further con-
ference should be held, at which Bolin’s theory would be top of the agenda.
When another meeting took place at Villach, Austria, in 1985, Bolin had prepared
a long paper, arguing that the problem of ‘human-induced climate change’ was po-
tentially so serious that it called for urgent global action at the highest level. The
conference endorsed all that Bolin said, and among those who found it particularly
powerful was Dr John Houghton, an evangelical Christian who had formerly been
professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford, but who since 1983 had been the head
of the UK Met Office. He was now to become Bolin’s most influential scientific ally.
But they might still have got nowhere with their cause had they not won an even
more influential political ally, a very rich but strongly left-wing Canadian business-
man, Maurice Strong. Since his teens, Strong had become convinced that the future
of mankind lay in transforming the UN into a world government. He had also become
a very skilful political networker at the highest level. In 1972, thanks to his personal
links with the head of the UN, he had been appointed to organise in Stockholm a
‘world conference on the environment’; and this led him to being asked to set up, as
its first head, a new UN agency, the UN Environment Program (UNEP).
In fact, Strong knew very little about the environment. But he had now come to
see it as the key to using the UN’s prestige to promote a sweeping left-wing agenda.
He argued that the natural resources of the earth were the common inheritance of all
mankind, and that the rich Western countries, which had benefited so disproportion-
ately from exploiting them, must now be made to fund the poorer countries in the
rest of the world, to help their economies to catch up.
In 1985, although Strong had by then stepped down as its director, it was UNEP
which joined the WMO in sponsoring the Villach climate conference. The meeting
was chaired by Strong’s like-minded successor as head of UNEP, Dr Mustafa Tolba. In
1987 the two men were able to push their agenda significantly further as members
of the Brundtland Commission, the body that was to put the word ‘sustainable’ into
the jargon of politicians and officialdom for decades to come. Thanks to their evi-
7dence and citing the recommendations from Villach, the Brundtland report laid par-
ticular emphasis on the dangers of ‘human-induced climate change’, warning that this
could raise global temperatures to such a level that it would have serious effects on
agriculture, ‘raise sea levels, flood coastal cities and disrupt national economies’. The
report therefore called for a major global effort to curb emissions of carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases.
In the same year, Strong played a key behind-the-scenes role in organising the
conference in his native Canada that produced the Montreal Protocol, the first global
treaty to ‘protect the environment’, that succeeded in phasing out the use of CFCs,
the chemicals thought to be destroying the ozone layer. This process enabled Strong
to see that, in global warming, he had found an even more powerful theme on which
to push his long-time political agenda. And in the landmark year of 1988 everything
seemed suddenly to be coming together.
First, on a stiflingly hot July day in Washington that summer, a Senate committee
heard a cleverly stage-managed rallying cry by another recent convert to the global
warming cause, James Hansen, who, as head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies (GISS), was in charge of one of the world’s key official temperature records.
The US media had been briefed to be present in force at this hearing, chaired by
Senator Tim Wirth and including among the members of its committee, Senator Al
Gore. The journalists were promised that they would hear something pretty sensa-
tional. Hansen’s wildly alarmist predictions that the world was heading for a global
Armageddon duly made lurid headlines across USA and beyond, including cover sto-
ries in Time and Newsweek. Wirth and Hansen had certainly pulled off quite a coup in
raising the threat of global warming to the top of the media agenda.
Quite separately, however, in November that year in Geneva, took place the in-
augural meeting of a new body, jointly sponsored by WMO and UNEP: the IPCC. Al-
though it was to be sold to the world as an impartial body of world scientists, the
IPCC was never intended by those who set it up to be anything of the kind. The two
men more than any responsible for this were Bolin, appointed as its first chairman,
and Houghton, chosen to chair ‘Working Group I’, which would contribute the all-
important section on the science of climate change when the IPCC came to compile
its first report. Not only were both men totally committed to the belief in ‘human in-
duced climate change’, so were almost all the lesser mortals round the table at that
first IPCC meeting, representing 34 nations, as can be seen from the statements each
submitted on behalf of their respective governments. 4 Within just two years, it was
proposed, the IPCC would present its first ‘assessment report’, in which the key in-
gredient would be computer models programmed to determine the extent to which
rising levels of carbon dioxide would warm the world. 5
When this First Assessment Report appeared in 1990, the global headlines were
led by a claim in its ‘Summary for Policymakers’ that the IPCC was ‘confident that the
8increase in CO 2 alone’ had been responsible for ‘more than half the world’s recent
warming’ and that this would ‘require immediate reductions in emissions from hu-
man activities of over 60 percent’.
‘Based on current models’, the Summary predicted that, unless drastic action was
taken, global temperatures would increase through the 21st century by up to 0.5 ◦ C
every decade, an increase far greater than anything ‘seen in the past 10,000 years’.
Although in the previous 100 years temperatures had increased by 0.6 ◦ C, the models
were now predicting the possibility of a not dissimilar increase every ten years. But
the Summary for Policymakers was drafted by Houghton himself. And a look at the
hundreds of pages which it was purporting to summarise showed a rather different
picture. Some of the scientists responsible for them had come to very much more
cautious, if not contradictory conclusions. One passage, for instance, admitted that:
…global warming of a larger size has almost certainly occurred at least once since
the last glaciation without any appreciable increase in greenhouse gases… [and]
because we do not understand the reasons for these past warming events, it is
not possible to attribute a specific proportion of the recent, smaller warming to
an increase in greenhouse gases.
But it was Houghton’s alarmist gloss on the actual findings of the report that, as was
intended, caught the attention of the world’s media and politicians. And this was just
what was wanted by their ally Strong, who was even now preparing for the unprece-
dented spectacular he planned to stage in Rio de Janeiro two years later.
The so-called ‘Earth Summit’, which Strong organised and chaired in Rio in 1992,
was easily the largest conference the world had ever seen. It was attended by 108
world leaders, ranging from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to a rather more reluctant US Presi-
dent George Bush Sr, along with 20,000 other official delegates. Also present in Rio
were 20,000 climate activists and members of green lobby groups, all paid for out of
UN and government funds, as arranged by Strong himself. He masterminded every
detail of this extraordinary gathering, and ensured that it would set up a Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to guide the advance to a global ‘climate
policy’.
It was planned that in 1997 the UNFCCC would stage another mega-conference
in Kyoto, where the nations of the world would sign a treaty agreeing to make drastic
cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. Or, to be more precise, in accordance with Strong’s
real long-term agenda, this treaty would commit the ‘developed’ countries of the
West to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions (since they were considered chiefly
responsible for the problem), while paying out huge sums to the still-developing na-
tions in the rest of the world, including China and India, to assist their economies to
catch up with the West.
For the tiny handful of meteorologists who, in the mid-1980s, had been discussing
how to get politicians to accept that global warming was a serious threat, all this
9amounted to an amazing coup. In just four short years they had raised it to the top of
the world’s political agenda. The first world leader to come on board in 1988 had been
Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who had been converted to the cause by
the UK’s ambassador to the UN, Crispin Tickell. He had won her over not least by cit-
ing Hansen’s evidence to the Senate committee. And she had then given enthusiastic
backing to John Houghton in his plans to set up the IPCC, and the funding to create
a new department of his UK Met Office, the Hadley Centre for Climate Change (later
to become the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research). This would be re-
sponsible, with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, for
another of what became the world’s four main global temperature records. 6
In America, the most prominent politician now totally committed to the cause was
Senator Al Gore from Tennessee; a member of that Senate committee in 1988, who
was about to become US vice-president under Bill Clinton.
In Brussels in October 1991, the European Community (shortly to become the Eu-
ropean Union) had acclaimed the IPCC report for showing how, for the first time, there
was now ‘a consensus among scientists on the possible impact and risks of the green-
house effect’. This came in a long document setting out A Community Strategy to Limit
Carbon Dioxide Emissions, proposing a Europe-wide conversion to renewable energy.
All in all, it was clear that the need to ‘combat climate change’ was very much an
idea whose time had come. But in light of the first step in Janis’s three-stage analy-
sis, we must note that, even then, the scientific base for the theory of the ‘true be-
lievers’ was in no way as secure as they pretended. The only ‘proof’ that they were
right lay in the projections of those computer models, specifically programmed to
assume that rising carbon dioxide was the most important factor driving global tem-
peratures and therefore changes to the climate. Politically, they had certainly made
astonishing progress. But, as was shown by the way Houghton had needed to ‘sex
up’ his Summary for Policymakers, they were still having to push pretty hard to make
their case seem as watertight as they would have liked. And it was already becom-
ing very evident that those who supported their cause were having to move on to
the second stage of the Janis rules, by insisting whenever possible that the case for
‘human-induced climate change’ was now accepted by a ‘consensus’ of the world’s
scientists.
10Rule 2: Creating the illusion of a ‘consensus’
Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time
for debate is over. The science is settled.
Al Gore, 1992
One eminent scientist very much not part of the ‘consensus’ was Dr Richard Lindzen,
the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology and one of America’s most respected atmospheric physicists. In 1992 he pub-
lished a long informal paper entitled ‘Global warming: the origin and nature of the
alleged scientific consensus’, the theme of which was the extraordinary pressure that
had built up in the late 1980s to create the impression that global warming was sup-
ported by an overwhelming ‘consensus’ of scientific opinion. He began by recalling a
letter he had received in 1988 from a respected professor of economics named Lester
Lave, who had been one of the other witnesses called before the 1988 Senate com-
mittee at which James Hansen had spoken so dramatically.
Unlike Hansen, Lave had told the senators that the global warming hypothesis
was still ‘controversial’, that by no means all scientists were agreed on it, and that the
science was still very uncertain as to what the causes of climate change might be.
Senator Gore expressed vehement irritation at this, claiming that anyone who said
such a thing couldn’t know what he was talking about, and suggesting that there
was no point in the senators hearing any more of Professor Lave’s evidence. 7
Lave had been so surprised to be dismissed by the committee in such summary
fashion that he had written to Lindzen, as one of America’s most distinguished clima-
tologists, to ask whether he had got it wrong. Lindzen confirmed that the case for
global warming was not only ‘controversial’ but also, in his view, ‘implausible’. 8
Two years later, when the IPCC produced its first report, as Lindzen described,
he had found it as a scientist deeply disturbing. He too had been shocked by the
way Houghton’s Summary for Policymakers had largely ignored the ‘uncertainty’ ex-
pressed in parts of the report itself, by attempting ‘to present the expectation of sub-
stantial warming as firmly based science’. 9 Indeed this had essentially been confirmed
by Houghton himself, admitting that:
…whilst every attempt was made by the lead authors to incorporate their com-
ments, in some cases these formed a minority opinion which could not be rec-
onciled with the larger consensus. 10
But Lindzen’s chief objections to the report were based on the area of science in which
he himself had unrivalled expertise. He noted that the IPCC’s predictions of future
temperatures and climate behaviour were all based on computer models. And what
particularly struck him was that the programming of these models was much too sim-
plistic. By giving pole position to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the
11main ‘forcing’ ingredient in driving future temperatures, and by failing to allow for
other natural influences on climate, their findings were demonstrably misleading.
In particular, observed Lindzen, the models overlooked or seriously misjudged
the part played by far the most important greenhouse gas of all, water vapour, which
makes up more than 90 percent of their total volume. They also failed to allow for
the effect of the increased cloud-cover that would result from the greater humidity
caused by warming of the oceans. Each of these effects would lessen the impact of
global warming. Account for them properly in the models, he argued, and it would
be seen that the ‘greenhouse effect’ caused by rising carbon dioxide levels had been
wildly overstated. What was more, this could be demonstrated by running those
same computer models retrospectively, to show where, if they were right, temper-
atures should have been throughout the 20th century. It became glaringly obvious
that these crudely over-simplified programmes failed to explain the actual variations
that had taken place in 20th century temperature levels. In the 1920s and 1930s,
when carbon dioxide emissions were comparatively low, temperatures had sharply
risen. But in the very years when emissions were rising much more steeply, between
1940 and the 1970s, temperatures had fallen back, in what became known to clima-
tologists as the ‘Little Cooling’. In fact, the assumptions on which the models were
based, said Lindzen, would have led them to predict a 20th century warming four
times greater than that actually recorded (with most of the rise taking place before
atmospheric carbon dioxide had reached anything like its present level). On this ba-
sis, how could any trust now be placed in their pretended ability to estimate future
rises? As Lindzen bluntly put it, the models had ‘neither the physics nor the numerical
accuracy to come up with findings which were not ‘disturbingly arbitrary’.
But even though this confirmed why Lindzen found the IPCC’s case for future
warming ‘implausible’ and seriously exaggerated, his lengthy paper on the nature of
the supposed ‘consensus’ in fact ranged very much wider. In particular, he focussed
on both the remarkable degree to which the notion of a ‘consensus’ had been used
to dominate public debate and also the extraordinary pressure brought to bear to
ensure that anyone daring to question it was marginalised.
For a start, it had been notable how quickly other influential interest groups had
rushed to join the cause. He described, for instance, how fervently global warming
had been taken up by the leading environmental campaigning organisations, such
as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the WWF. These pressure groups, which had
originally emerged out of the ‘environmental awakening’ of the 1960s, had now at-
tained very considerable status and influence as ‘non-governmental organisations’
(NGOs).
The chief original target of all these campaigning groups had been the need to
save the world from the ‘threat’ posed by nuclear weapons and nuclear power sta-
tions. 11 But with remarkable unanimity, as the Cold War came to an end, they had
12all suddenly switched the focus of their attention to this new threat to the planet. As
Lindzen put it:
…these lobbying groups have budgets of several million dollars and employ about
50,000 people. Their support is highly valued by many political figures. As with
any large groups, self-perpetuation becomes a crucial concern. ‘Global warming’
has become one of the major battle cries in their fundraising efforts. At the same
time, the media unquestioningly accept the pronouncements of these groups as
objective truth.
In March 1989 the main NGOs had formed an umbrella organisation, the Climate Ac-
tion Network, to co-ordinate their campaigning on global warming. This shadowy
body was to be used by Strong in 1992 to co-ordinate his recruiting of the 20,000
activists who attended his Rio summit.
At the same time, another such group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, which
had also originally been formed to campaign on nuclear issues, organised a petition
urging the recognition of global warming as potentially the greatest danger faced by
mankind. The eventual list of 700 signatories, including Nobel prizewinners and many
members of the National Academy of Sciences, seemed hugely impressive. But ‘only
about three or four’ of them, according to Lindzen, were qualified climate scientists.
At the 1990 meeting of the National Academy, its president, referring specifically
to this petition, went out of his way to warn members against ‘lending their credibil-
ity to issues about which they had no special knowledge’. 12 His warning was to be
conspicuously ignored.
Lindzen also recalled how quickly the new cause had become fashionable among
leading figures in showbusiness, such as the Hollywood actors Robert Redford, Bar-
bra Streisand and Meryl Streep, all of whom made much-publicised calls, in Redford’s
words, for people to stop just ‘researching’ the warming threat and to ‘begin acting’
(which, as Lindzen wryly observed, was not an unreasonable thing for an actor to
suggest).
Also now becoming obvious, however, was just how much new money was now
becoming available for research into climate change. Even though in 1989 President
George Bush Sr’s senior White House advisers had initially been sceptical on the issue,
so great now was political pressure that in 1989 they authorised a staggering increase
in the federal budget for climate change research. Over the next four years this was
to increase from just $134 million to a total of $2.8 billion. 13
But, as Lindzen noted, it had soon become clear that any proposals deemed likely
to be at all ambivalent over global warming were highly unlikely to be accepted. He
recalled how, in the winter of 1989, the National Science Foundation had withdrawn
funding from one of his MIT colleagues, Professor Reginald Newell, when his data
analyses failed to show that the previous century had seen a net warming (one re-
viewer suggested that his results were ‘dangerous to humanity’). 14
13This was an indication of just how ruthless the pressure had become to shut any
critics of the ‘consensus’ out of the debate. When Lindzen himself submitted a critique
of the global warming thesis to Science, the journal of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, his article was rejected as being of ‘no interest’ to its
readership. But, to his astonishment, Science then proceeded to attack his paper even
though it had not been published.
Although the article eventually appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteoro-
logical Society, its editor made ‘a determined effort to solicit rebuttals’, including one
that was an attack on Lindzen by Stephen Schneider, a scientist who in the 1970s had
been a prominent supporter of the belief that the world might be heading for a new
ice age, but was now one of the leading advocates of warming.
The letters the paper aroused from the Bulletin’s readers, however, were predomi-
nantly sceptical of the case for anthropogenic warming. Indeed, a subsequent Gallup
poll of climate scientists belonging to the American Meteorological Society and the
American Physical Union showed that no fewer than 49 percent rejected it. Only 18
percent thought that some warming was caused by man, while 33 percent were ‘don’t
knows’.
Lindzen noted how a number of the scientists participating in the IPCC report had
…testified to the pressure put on them to emphasise results supportive of the
current scenario and to suppress other results. That pressure has frequently been
effective, and a survey of participants reveals substantial disagreement with the
final report. 15
‘Why, one might wonder’, Lindzen asked, was ‘there such insistence on scientific una-
nimity on the warming issue’? After all, he observed,
…unanimity in science is virtually non-existent on far less complex matters. Una-
nimity on an issue as uncertain as ‘global warming’ would be surprising and sus-
picious. Moreover, why are the opinions of scientists sought regardless of their
field of expertise? Biologists and physicians are rarely asked to endorse some
theory in high-energy physics. Apparently, when one comes to ‘global warm-
ing’, any scientist’s agreement will do.
The supporters of the ‘consensus’ were now clearly becoming impatient of anyone
who dared question their orthodoxy. This takes us on to the final stage of Janis’s three
rules of groupthink: the ruthless way in which a ‘consensus’ must be defended against
anyone who disagrees with it. This is necessary for upholders of the ‘consensus’, not
only in propaganda terms, showing a wider audience how any critics can safely be ig-
nored, but in psychological terms, by reinforcing their own belief that the ‘consensus’
is unquestionably right.
14Rule 3: Putting ‘non-believers’ beyond the pale
Once Lindzen’s sceptical views had become known, as he described in his paper, he
had been singled out for venomous attack, even in books, such as World on Fire: Sav-
ing an Endangered Earth, published in 1991 by George Mitchell, the Democrats’ ma-
jority leader in the Senate. In fact Lindzen was far from alone in being given such
treatment. He and other ‘climate sceptics’ were now being regularly subjected to dis-
missive ridicule in the press, as in an article in the New York Times by Al Gore, in which,
by somewhat ironic projection, he compared those who shared his views to Galileo,
bravely standing for the truth against the intolerant consensus of his time.
But just how vicious in suppressing criticism the supporters of the ‘consensus’ had
become was illustrated by the fate of two other eminent scientists who had also pub-
licly shown that they did not subscribe to the ‘consensus’. In the summer of 1992,
Al Gore, by now the leading political crusader on global warming in America, was
bidding to become the Democrat Party’s candidate for vice-president. As part of his
campaign he published a book, Earth in the Balance, claiming that global warming
was ‘the worst threat we have ever faced’. 16
Gore paid glowing tribute to the man who had first alerted him to this threat when
he was at Harvard in the mid-1960s: the distinguished oceanographer, Roger Revelle.
Back in the 1950s, as head of a department at the University of California in San Diego,
Revelle had been behind the setting up of the research station on top of the Hawai-
ian volcano Mauna Loa that measures the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
When the data had shown that these were steadily rising, it was this more than any-
thing else that helped to set the great alarm over global warming on its way.
When Gore wrote his book in 1992, he seemed unaware that, although Revelle
had recognised a possible connection between greenhouse gases and global tem-
peratures, he had long been taking a very much more cautious view on global warm-
ing than that now being championed by Gore himself. In July 1988, after Hansen
made headlines with his testimony to Wirth’s Senate committee, Revelle had written
to a member of Congress:
Most scientists familiar with the subject are not yet willing to bet that the climate
this year is the result of ‘greenhouse warming’. As you very well know, climate is
highly variable from year to year, and the causes of these variations are not at
all well understood. My own personal belief is that we should wait another ten
or twenty years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be
important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways. 17
Four days later Revelle had written to Wirth himself, cautioning that:
…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount
of warming becomes clearer. It is not yet obvious that this summer’s hot weather
and drought are the result of a global climatic change or simply an example of
15the uncertainties of climate variability. My own feeling is that we had better wait
another ten years before making confident predictions. 18
In 1990, at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Revelle was approached by an old friend, Dr Fred Singer, then professor of environ-
mental science at the University of Virginia, but who, back in the 1960s, had worked
with NASA to design and set up, as its first director, the US National Satellite Weather
Service. The two men discussed writing an informal paper together on global warm-
ing, which Singer went on to draft for submission to a small-circulation journal called
Cosmos. When he and Revelle met to discuss the proofs, they agreed several amend-
ments, and the article was published in April 1991. It was entitled ‘What to do about
greenhouse warming: look before you leap’. Their main argument, echoing the views
that Revelle had expressed earlier in his letters to the members of Congress, was that:
Drastic, precipitous, and especially unilateral steps to delay the putative green-
house impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of
global poverty without being effective. Stringent economic controls now would
be economically devastating particularly for developing countries. . . ’
They concluded that:
…the scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic
action at this time.
The article attracted little attention and three months later, professionally active to
the end of his life, Revelle died aged 82. Later that year, however, Singer was invited
to contribute to a book on global warming and suggested that their article be repub-
lished.
The following summer of 1992, when Al Gore was running hard to win the vice-
presidential nomination, the New Republic picked up on the contrast between the
references to Revelle in his new book and the views expressed in the article he had co-
authored with Singer. 19 This was prominently reported elsewhere in the media and,
after Gore won the nomination, was even raised in a televised election debate. Gore’s
response was not only to protest that Revelle’s views in the article had been ‘taken
completely out of context’, but to use one of his close associates, Dr Justin Lancaster of
Harvard, to ask Singer to remove Revelle’s name from the article. This was somewhat
impractical, since it had already been published.
However, Lancaster persisted in his efforts, not only claiming that Revelle had not
really been a co-author of the article and that his name had only been included ‘over
his objections’, but even suggesting that Singer must have been pressuring a sick old
man whose mental capacities were failing.
When, after Gore had become US vice-president, Lancaster repeated his charges,
Singer in April 1993 sued him for libel. And this led to a remarkable revelation. When
the two sides exchanged documents, it emerged that it was Gore who had particu-
larly pressed Lancaster about Revelle’s mental state towards the end of his life: hence
16Lancaster’s suggestions that Singer had been quite improperly exploiting Revelle’s
loss of his faculties.
But Lancaster was now prepared to agree that Revelle had in fact been ‘mentally
sharp to the end’. He also admitted that Revelle had shown him the article before it
was published, with the comment that there did not seem to be anything in it that
‘was not true’. 20
In February 1994, an ABC News presenter, Ted Koppel, revealed on his Nightline
programme that Vice President Gore had rung him in person, suggesting that he
should expose the sinister political and economic forces behind what he called the
‘anti-environmental movement’. Gore had in particular urged him to expose the fact
that Singer and other scientists who had voiced sceptical views about global warming
were receiving money from the coal industry and other fossil-fuel interests.
Such charges were already becoming an all-too familiar feature of the debate.
Anyone daring to express doubts about the ‘consensus’ might now face accusations
that they could only be expressing these views because they had been paid to do
so by energy firms, ‘Big Oil’ or even the tobacco industry. 21 But when Koppel called
Gore’s bluff by reporting the call from the vice-president on air, this attempt to use a
leading news programme to discredit his opponents provoked such political embar-
rassment that, shortly afterwards, Lancaster settled his case with Singer by issuing a
full retraction and apology. 22
This sorry episode was a further graphic illustration of how those caught up in any
form of groupthink are likely to respond to anyone who doesn’t agree with them. As
Janis showed, because the only evidence they are willing to recognise is that which
confirms their own mindset, anyone who dissents must be discredited, stereotyped
and caricatured as only doing so from some ignoble motive.
Rather than attempting to address the points dissenters are raising, these are rou-
tinely countered by ad-hominem attacks on their character. Some dark reason must
be found to explain why such people should not be listened to, such as suggesting
that they are only questioning the ‘consensus’ because they are being paid to do so.
But such propaganda tactics can only be effective so long as the illusory ‘consen-
sus’ continues to hold the moral high ground.
176
The ‘idea whose time had come’
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution,
the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the
bill. . . all these dangers are caused by human intervention…the real enemy then is
humanity itself.
The First Global Revolution, Report by the Club of Rome, 1991 23
So far, we have looked in some detail at how the origins of this belief system provide
a perfect case study in the workings of groupthink, by demonstrating how all the
three stages of this archetypal pattern so quickly emerged from the very start of the
global warming story. We shall shortly follow that story in a more summary form,
looking at just some of the more conspicuous examples of how consistently Janis’s
rules continued to shape it over the years to come. But first we must briefly consider
two of the deeper psychological reasons why the global warming ‘narrative’ had so
widely and rapidly taken hold in the late 1980s, as an ‘idea whose time had come’.
The first reason was the profound shift in collective consciousness that had taken
place in the late 1950s and 1960s, giving rise to what became known as ‘environ-
mentalism’ and the ‘environmental movement’. This was the awareness that, for the
first time in history, science had given mankind the power to destroy all life on earth.
Obviously, the supreme expression of this idea was the fearful shadow cast by the
possibility of nuclear war. With the Cold War, the world was divided between two
great camps, each armed with missiles carrying hydrogen bombs, capable not just of
immediate catastrophic destruction but of spreading radioactivity so widely that it
might render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.
But this realisation also coincided with a new awareness of the damage mankind
was already inflicting on nature and the natural environment, through toxic chemi-
cals, the methods of modern agriculture, the ever-growing pollution of the seas by
indestructible plastic wastes, the pressures of over-population and the evidence that
so many species seemed now to be threatened by human activity with extinction.
In 1958 these fears had had given rise to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,
in 1961 to the founding of WWF and in 1962 to Rachel Carson’s hugely best-selling
Silent Spring on the threat posed to wildlife by pesticides. By the end of the 1960s it
had led to the launching of the two most influential of all environmental campaigning
groups, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, both initially focused on the nuclear
threat.
No image caught the new mood of the time better than ‘Earthrise’, the picture
of the soft blue Earth taken in 1968 from the Apollo 11 space mission, widely inter-
preted as showing how vulnerable the earth had become to the destructive powers
of humanity as ‘the only planet we’ve got’.
18In 1972 came that first ‘World Environment Conference’, organised for the UN and
shaped according to his own political agenda by Maurice Strong. In the same year,
the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth report, selling 37 million copies worldwide,
used a computer model to show how population growth would soon outrun food
production and natural resources, to threaten the survival of civilisation.
All this had created a mindset and a narrative which, by casting humanity as its
own worst enemy, as ‘the cuckoo in the nest of creation’, was perfectly fitted by the
late 1980s to take on board this great new scare story: that, quite apart from all the
other threats mankind was posing to the future of the planet, conceivably the worst
(apart of course from a nuclear holocaust) was the possibility that runaway global
warming created by human emissions of greenhouse gases might lead to the de-
struction of all life on earth.
This was why, as the Cold War came to an end, with the sudden collapse of the So-
viet communist empire removing the fear of nuclear war almost overnight, those en-
vironmental groups that had been founded on their opposition to nuclear weapons
and nuclear power, were able to morph seamlessly into seeing the need to fight the
threat of man-made global warming as their new great cause. They were also joined
in this by WWF, on the grounds that global warming was a serious new addition to its
prime purpose, to fight for species threatened with extinction.
The key to the success of the new cause was precisely that it made such an appeal
to the moral sense. Those caught up in it were convinced that they were supporting
the ‘good guys’ in wanting to ‘save the planet’ from a quite unprecedented catastro-
phe. But they were thus fitting into a very ancient and archetypal pattern of collective
human psychology. Ever since the biblical story of Noah, history (or myth) had been
full of episodes where it was believed that mankind was facing some immense dis-
aster that threatened the end of the world. Common to all such millennial scenarios
was the conviction that this would be a punishment for the wickedness of the human
race in having taken a morally wrong turning. And a very powerful part of the appeal
of this particular narrative was that it divided the world into the ‘bad guys’ who had
set humanity on course for disaster by persuading it down the primrose path of de-
pendence on those evil fossil fuels, and the ‘good guys’ who had finally woken up to
how dangerously mistaken this had been. By joining this new holy cause, one was
choosing to side with ‘life’ rather than continuing blindly on a course which would
otherwise bring death to all life on earth – unless humanity could be persuaded to
wake up in time, and to take the very drastic actions that alone could bring salvation.
If any form of groupthink relies on a conviction that it holds the moral high ground,
the ‘consensus’ over global warming was about to face its own first real moral chal-
lenge. This was when, for the first time, a serious scandal came to light over the inner
workings of its most prestigious authority, the IPCC.
197
The IPCC breaks its own rules: the ‘consensus’
survives its first major scandal
The members’ firm belief in the morality of their group and their use of
undifferentiated stereotypes of their opponents would enable them to minimise
conflicts between ethical values and expediency. . . ‘Since our group’s objectives
are good’, the members feel, ‘any means we decide to use must be good’ . . . Shared
negative stereotypes that feature the evil nature of the enemy would enhance their
sense of moral righteousness and their pride in the lofty mission of the in-group.
Irving Janis, Groupthink
If the IPCC is incapable of following its most basic procedures, it would be best to
abandon the entire IPCC process, or at least that part that is concerned with the
scientific evidence on climate change, and look for more reliable sources of advice
on this important question.
Professor Frederick Seitz, former President of the National Academy of Sciences 24
The scandal erupted in 1996, following the publication of the IPCC’s Second Assess-
ment Report, although on this occasion it had been decided to issue the Summary for
Policymakers some time before the release of the full report. One sentence in it had
caught worldwide headlines. It claimed that ‘the balance of evidence suggests that
there is a discernible human influence on global climate’. And the source for this was
given as Chapter 8 of the Working Group 1 report. Sure enough, when the full report
did finally appear, a similar sentence was discovered buried away in its hundreds of
pages.
But no one was more surprised by this than several of the scientific contributors
to those same pages, who had earlier signed off the text as an accurate record of
what they had agreed. These now much-quoted words had not appeared in the draft
they formally approved at a meeting in Madrid in November 1995 (also attended by
177 government delegates from 96 countries and 14 NGO representatives). 25 Partic-
ularly odd was that the only sources cited for the new wording were two papers co-
authored by one of the lead authors on this part of the report: a scientist employed
by the US government named Ben Santer. In clear breach of one of the IPCC’s strictest
rules, these two cited papers had not even yet been published.
What astonished the scientists even more, however, was to discover that no less
than 15 key statements from their agreed text had been deleted. And each of these
had expressed serious doubt over the human contribution to global warming. They
included, for instance, such statements as:
None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute
the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.
20and
No study to date has positively attributed all or part (of the climate change ob-
served) to (man-made) causes.
This all seemed so irregular that, a week after the full report appeared, the Wall Street
Journal published a devastating article headed ‘Major deception on global warming’,
by one of the most respected scientists in America, Professor Frederick Seitz, a for-
mer president of the National Academy of Sciences. 26 Seitz quoted some of the 15
passages that had been so damningly deleted, thundering that:
In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community,
including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the
American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption
of the peer-review process than the events which led up to this IPCC report.
‘The major responsibility’ for what had happened, he suggested, must lie with the
lead author, Santer. ‘IPCC reports’, Seitz observed, ‘are often called the “consensus”
view’. But if they were to lead to ‘carbon taxes and restraints on economic growth,
they will have a major and almost certainly destructive effect on the economies of
the world’. He went on
Whatever the intent was of those who made these significant changes, their ef-
fect is to deceive policy makers and the public into believing that scientific evi-
dence shows human activities are causing global warming.
The IPCC establishment was clearly very shaken at having been caught out like this.
So unimpeachable was Seitz’s reputation that his article could not simply be ignored.
Nor was it possible to discredit him personally (although that limp effort was made
to associate him with Fred Singer, as co-authors of a paper which, it was insinuated,
must have been funded by allies of the tobacco industry).
The Wall Street Journal published defensive letters from both Bolin and Houghton,
along with one from Santer himself, (co-signed by Tom Wigley, another close adviser
of Al Gore and former director of the University of East Anglia’s CRU), all denying that
what had happened had been in breach of the IPCC’s rules.
This point was developed in a paper by another member of the IPCC establish-
ment, Stephen Schneider, who had also been present at the Madrid meeting. 27 He
did confirm that it was Santer who had been responsible for all the deletions and ad-
ditions. But he also described how, entirely within the rules (as he claimed), a little
group of scientists had then gone off into a separate room to approve the changes. 28
What only came to light two years later, in evidence to a Congressional committee,
was the sequence of events that had preceded the making of the changes. Before
the contributing scientists had signed off the text, Houghton, as the report’s editor,
received a message from the State Department in Washington, which read:
It is essential that the chapters not be finalised prior to the completion of the
discussions at the IPCC Working Group 1 Plenary in Madrid, and that chapter au-
21thors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner following
the discussion in Madrid. 29
This instruction had come from the office of the man who was now the US Under-
Secretary of State for Global Affairs: Timothy Wirth, the longtime close ally of Vice
President Gore and chairman of those historic Senate committee hearings in 1988.
Top of the US administration’s agenda at the time had been the effort to ensure a
successful outcome to the global climate conference due to take place in Kyoto in
1997. For this they considered it vital that the IPCC should pronounce more forcefully
than before that there could no longer be any doubt that global warming was caused
by human activity.
By any measure, this episode might have led observers to question whether the
IPCC was quite the impartial, non-political body it was purported to be. But such was
the power of the groupthink, which now held so many in its grip – not least the media
– that the dust soon settled. The authority of IPCC, as representing a ‘consensus of the
world’s top climate scientists’, emerged unscathed.
It is a fair guess that few of the 10,000 people who attended the UNFCCC’s mega-
conference in Kyoto in December 1997 were not (in every sense) fully paid-up sup-
porters of the ‘consensus’. They included 2000 official delegates – politicians, offi-
cials and academics – supported by 5000 fully-funded climate activists and members
of green lobby groups (44 from Greenpeace alone), plus 3000 representatives of the
world’s media, almost all of whom would have been sympathetic to the conference’s
aims. The star of the show was Vice President Gore, who descended by helicopter
on the main conference hotel just in time to give the opening keynote address. Also
much in evidence, though no longer chairing the occasion, was Maurice Strong, And
the purpose of the gathering was to sign the world’s first full-scale global ‘climate
treaty’ which, after months of fierce behind-the-scenes haggling, was very much on
the lines originally drawn up by Strong.
The rich industrialised nations of the West, classified as ‘Annex 1 countries’, would
agree to curb their carbon dioxide emissions, while the still ‘developing’ Annex 2
countries, including China and India, would be exempted, to allow their economies
to catch up with the West. The one-sided nature of this deal put Gore on the spot,
because it was precisely the reason why the US Senate had already voted 95-0 that
America could not accept such a treaty. But, to unanimous applause, Gore signed it
anyway.
Even though one of his close advisers, Tom Wigley, formerly director of the Univer-
sity of East Anglia’s CRU, famously calculated that the emissions cuts signed up to by
the developed countries would only slow the rise in global temperatures by six years,
the political focus over the next few years was to persuade the requisite number of
countries to ratify the treaty to bring it into force. And it had already been agreed
that Kyoto was only a first step, to be replaced by another, much tougher treaty a few
22years down the line.
For all this, it was vital for the IPCC to step up the pressure with its next report,
due in 2001. This was to lead to what would become, scientifically, the most revealing
episode in its history.
8 The ‘consensus’ fudges the evidence
He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls
the past.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Up to now, it seemed the global warming theory was looking ever more plausible.
As carbon dioxide levels continued to rise, so did the trend in global temperatures,
seemingly just as predicted. But the one problem which more than anything worried
the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC was the long-held assumption
that during the Middle Ages – the so-called Medieval Warm Period – the world had
been even hotter than it had become in the late-20th century. Obviously, this was
centuries before it could have been blamed on man-made carbon dioxide. 30
The story of how the IPCC got around this problem has long been familiar and
fully-documented. 31 It began in 1995 with a famous email from one of the little group
of scientists at the heart of the IPCC, Jonathan Overpeck, to another scientist whom
he assumed agreed with the ‘consensus’. In it, Overpeck said ‘we have to get rid of the
Mediaeval Warm Period’.
Four years later, bang on cue, there appeared in Nature a graph, produced by a
hitherto unknown young PhD, Michael Mann, which supplied just what was needed.
Mann and two colleagues had wholly rewritten the accepted picture of historic world
temperatures. Their graph showed temperatures having steadily declined over the
past millennium in an almost unwavering downward line, until suddenly, in the late
20th century, they dramatically spiked upwards to by far their highest level in 1000
years (thus giving the graph the shape of the handle and blade of an ice-hockey stick).
The Medieval Warm Period had completely disappeared. So had the four-centuries-
long Little Ice Age. And it further helped that 1998 had been measured as the hottest
year since modern temperature records began, bringing the graph to its suitably ter-
rifying climax.
This was everything those at the top of the IPCC could have wanted. When its
Third Assessment Report appeared in 2001, the ‘hockey-stick’ not only led the first
page of the Summary for Policymakers but at the launch of the report, Houghton
appeared to the media in front of a huge blow-up of Mann’s graph. It also appeared
five more times in the report itself. It was this startling image as much as anything
that encouraged the Summary to go even further than its predecessors in claiming
23that ‘there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over
the past 50 years is attributable to human activity’, and to predict that, within 100
years, global temperatures could have risen by as much as 5.8 ◦ C, much higher than
anything suggested before. 32
But it was also the strangely familiar hockey stick shape which, a year or two later,
caught the attention of Steve McIntyre, a Canadian expert in statistics. As an industrial
consultant, the shape of the hockey stick aroused his suspicion because he had often
seen similar graphs produced by companies wishing to give an exaggeratedly opti-
mistic picture of their future business prospects. When McIntyre and a Canadian eco-
nomics professor, Ross McKitrick, used their expertise to analyse the way Mann had
constructed the graph, they became increasingly astonished. In essence it seemed
that Mann’s algorithm was ‘mining’ the underlying data for hockey-stick shapes, and
therefore would give a hockey stick result from whatever data was fed into it. In fact,
although the graph purported to show temperatures over the past 1000 years for
the whole of the Northern Hemisphere, Mann’s initial ‘proxy’ temperature data had
largely consisted just of tree-rings from North America (a notoriously unreliable way
to measure past temperatures). But almost the only trees from the sample which ac-
tually had a hockey-stick shape had been one group of bristlecone pines in California.
Yet Mann’s algorithm had given these 390 times more weight than a tree-ring sam-
ple from Arkansas which had failed to show a ‘hockey stick’ shape. Finally, and even
more oddly, the temperatures for the closing decades of the 20th century were not
based on tree-ring proxies at all. They were thermometer-recorded data, and in the
much-publicised version of the graph published in the IPCC’s 2001 report, they had
been spliced onto the end of the tree-ring data. 33 It was only this combination of two
wholly different data sources which gave the graph that final, eye-catching uptick.
Initially McIntyre and McKitrick had great difficulty in getting any scientific journal
to publish their findings. Nature, which had originally published the graph and had
long been a highly partisan advocate for the ‘consensus’, flatly refused to allow them
to explain what their meticulous analysis had revealed. 34 But once they had found a
journal willing to publish their findings, it became increasingly clear that the IPCC es-
tablishment had again been seriously caught out, and this time on the very ‘evidence’
it had made the single most widely publicised argument for their cause.
We later learned from the Climategate emails, leaked in 2009 from CRU, just what
angst and anger this had aroused among that same intimately connected group of
scientists who were now at the heart of the IPCC. In the exchanges of emails all their
names were there: Mann himself, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Stephen Schneider, Jonathan
Overpeck, Kevin Trenberth, and Gavin Schmidt, who was Hansen’s number two at
GISS and in charge of one of the two main global surface temperature records. At
East Anglia itself, their close ally, CRU director Phil Jones, was responsible for the other
surface record, HadCRUt.
24What these emails also brought to light was that, just when Mann had been cre-
ating his ‘hockey-stick’, Jones’s CRU colleague Keith Briffa had already been trying to
produce a remarkably similar graph, also based on tree-ring ‘proxies’, this time from
Siberia. But these had also frustratingly seemed to show a marked falling off of tem-
peratures in the second half of the 20th century, which showed that they were not
proxies for temperature at all. It was this problem that led to the most quoted of all
the Climategate emails, describing how they had used ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ to ‘hide the
decline’. In other words, they had cut off the tree-ring sequence just where it wasn’t
giving the picture they wanted, and then, like Mann, incorporated thermometer tem-
peratures for recent decades, making them look much warmer than the medieval era.
Once out in the open, the ‘hockey-stick’ controversy continued tortuously to roll
on for two more years. Two of Mann’s closest academic colleagues, publicly champi-
oned by Houghton, pulled out all the stops to ensure that the next IPCC report, due
in 2007, would include evidence confirming the accuracy of the ‘hockey stick’. 35
In fact, since 2001, there had been two significant changes at the top of the IPCC.
Houghton himself had stepped down as head of Working Group I, responsible for the
science of climate change. In 2002, it had been given, for political reasons, a new
chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the obscure director of a small, Delhi-based research
institute, TERI. Pachauri had formerly been a railway engineer, before getting a PhD
in the ‘economics of energy’. He had no background in climate science. 36
In 2006 Mann’s graph was the subject of two separate Congressional inquiries.
One included several of his supporters, who made sure that its findings were not too
obviously damaging. The other commissioned a report from Dr Edward Wegman,
one of America’s most respected statisticians, which was fiercely critical of Mann’s
methodology. In a line which could almost have come from Irving Janis, Wegman
wrote that Mann’s academic supporters were
…a tightly-knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. How-
ever, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mecha-
nism.
In other words, the group’s method was to discuss, peer-review and cite each other’s
work, to maximise the authority of their shared view. But despite all their efforts, care-
fully orchestrated by their allies inside the IPCC, and despite further breaches of the
IPCC’s strict prohibition on citing papers not yet published, the final report’s defence
of Mann was pretty well buried away. Its only repetition of his graph was so scrambled
together with others in a ‘spaghetti’ diagram that it was barely visible.
Although the ‘hockey stick’ had now been so widely discredited that it had all but
sunk from view, it would continue to be used by supporters of the ‘consensus’ as if
none of this had happened. In the eyes of politicians and the media, the prestige of
the IPCC remained as high as ever.
259
When groupthink meets the outside world
Sir David King goes to Moscow
They revealed an absolute – and I stress absolute – inability to answer questions . . .
when it became clear that they could not provide a substantive answer to a
question . . . attempts were made to disrupt the seminar. At least four times during
the course of the seminar, ugly scenes were staged which prevented the seminar
from proceeding normally. As a result we lost at least four hours of working time.
Vladimir Putin’s chief economic adviser speaking of the behaviour of the British
delegation led by Sir David King at an international conference on global warming
in Moscow in 2004
History can provide few more remarkable examples of the power of groupthink than
the scale on which, by the early years of the 21st century, the supporters of the ‘con-
sensus’ had now taken over every major scientific institution in the Western world. 37
Every prestigious scientific body, led by the Royal Society in Britain and the National
Academy of Sciences in America, every reputable scientific journal such as Nature and
Science, every university (and pretty well the entire education system) was by now not
just committed to the official orthodoxy but evangelising for the cause.
Scientists from almost any discipline were vying to produce ever more scary sce-
narios of how polar ice would melt, sea levels rise, and droughts, floods, hurricanes
and killer heatwaves become more frequent, not least because this was now the eas-
iest way to get access to public funding for any research which could be related, how-
ever tangentially, to ‘climate change’.
But these scientists and academics were all operating from within the ‘consen-
sus’ bubble. This meant that they only talked to each other, confident that they all
shared the same a-priori assumptions. In their exchanges with their colleagues and
at their endless publicly-funded conferences, they never met anyone who might dis-
agree with them or ask awkward questions.
But we now recall two examples of what happened on the very rare occasions
when those inside the bubble inadvertently came up against genuine experts from
outside it. The first was the experience of Sir David King who, since 2000, had been
the chief scientific adviser to the British government under Tony Blair. In 2004, with
the US still failing to ratify Kyoto, Blair was bidding to take the international lead in
getting enough countries to ratify the treaty for it to come into force. And he now
sent King into battle to support him.
As a specialist in surface chemistry, King had no qualifications in climate science
whatever. But in January 2004 this did not stop him writing in Science that global
warming was now the ‘most severe’ problem facing mankind, ‘a far greater threat to
the world than terrorism’. King attacked President George W. Bush for failing to bring
26the US, as the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter, into line (overlooking the fact
that it was the US Senate that had unanimously vetoed even signing the treaty, let
alone ratifying it).
In March, King went much further, warning a committee of MPs that the South
Pole had already lost 40 percent of its ice and that the melting of the polar ice caps
could cause a shift in the Gulf Stream, which would lower temperatures in Britain and
Europe by as much as 10 ◦ C. This ‘could happen quite suddenly’, said King, as could the
‘switching off’ of the Indian monsoon. ‘There could be a point, and it is quite likely’, he
went on, where temperatures rose too high for tropical forests to survive, ‘so that they
would switch from being net absorbers of carbon dioxide to net emitters’. This could
trigger a repeat of what had happened 55 million years ago, when carbon dioxide
rose to 1000 parts per million of the atmosphere. Most of the Earth was so hot that
this made ‘Antarctica virtually the only place on the planet which was habitable’. 38
The British politicians might have been ready to believe all this, but four months
later King found a very different audience when, at Blair’s request, he led a team of
British scientists to Moscow, to take part in an international seminar organised for the
Russian Academy of Sciences by President Putin’s chief economic adviser, Alexander
Ilarionov. King’s mission was to persuade the Russians to ratify Kyoto, which would
at last bring the treaty into force. But Russia’s leading scientists could not have been
more opposed to the Western ‘consensus’ that carbon dioxide was the chief driver of
global warming. And when King saw that the list of speakers invited to address the
conference included some of the world’s leading scientists who were most sceptical
of the IPCC ‘consensus’, he furiously described them as ‘undesirables’, saying that they
should not be allowed to speak. 39
When it was insisted that the seminar would continue as planned, the gathering
was astonished by the behaviour of King and his colleagues. They ran on for much
longer than their allotted time, frequently interrupted other speakers, and on four
occasions caused the proceedings to break up in such disorder that they had to be
suspended. The climax came when King himself was at the podium, putting forward
the ‘consensus’ view on one of its favourite memes: that global warming was respon-
sible for the melting of the ice cap on Kilimanjaro. One of those in the audience who
could see that King had no idea what he was talking about was Professor Paul Reiter,
the world’s leading authority on insect-borne diseases, such as malaria. As an adviser
to the World Health Organization, he had contributed to the IPCC’s 1996 report, but
had been strongly critical of its claim that global warming would cause a spread of
diseases. And he had already aroused King’s ire at the conference, by detailing where
the IPCC had got the science on his own subject so badly wrong.
Reiter now stood up to explain politely that King seemed unaware of the several
expert studies which had shown that the shrinking of the Kilimanjaro ice cap had
nothing to do with global warming. The ice had been melting since the 1880s. Most
27of its retreat had been in the years before 1950. Its cause had been local deforestation,
which had led to a severe drop in precipitation. Unable to answer Reiter’s points, King
broke off mid-sentence of a halting reply and led his team out of the room.
At the end of proceedings, Ilarionov called a press conference to speak angrily
about all they had witnessed. He began by recalling that months earlier the Russian
Academy had sent nine questions on science to the IPCC, to which they had been
offered nothing in reply but political exhortations for Russia to ratify the treaty. Noth-
ing in the Kyoto Protocol itself, he said, or ‘the “scientific” theory on which it is based’
had been ‘borne out by the data’. The predicted consequences of global warming,
‘increased droughts, floods, hurricanes or other extreme weather events’ had simply
not taken place. If there was:
…an insignificant increase in the temperature, it is not due to anthropogenic fac-
tors but to natural factors connected with planet itself and solar activity.
He went on to speak witheringly about the ‘distorted and falsified’ data used to pro-
mote the ‘consensus’, mentioning the ‘hockey stick’. And he then tore apart the be-
haviour of King and his colleagues, pointing out their complete inability to answer
scientific questions and referring to those ‘ugly scenes’ that had ‘prevented the sem-
inar from proceeding normally’.
Ilarionov ended with a peroration warning that the world seemed once again to
be up against a ‘man-hating, totalitarian ideology’, dealing in ‘misinformation, falsifi-
cation, fabrication, mythology and propaganda’, in an attempt ‘to prove the alleged
validity’ of its theory. No one listening to this storming rejection of all the ‘consensus’
stood for could have guessed that, four months later, on a private initiative by Tony
Blair, President Putin would do a complete U-turn. In return for Russia being allowed
to join the World Trade Organization on very favourable terms, it would now ratify
the Kyoto Treaty.
28An insider’s account of the IPCC
The issue of consensus is key to understanding the limitations of IPCC
pronouncements. Consensus is the stuff of politics, not of science. . .
. . . in the age of information, popular knowledge of scientific information. . . is
awash in the tide of misinformation. . .
Alarmist activists operating in well-funded advocacy groups have a lead role
in creating this misinformation. In many cases they manipulate public perceptions
with emotive and fiercely judgmental ‘scientific’ pronouncements. . .
Scientists who challenge these alarmists are rarely given priority by the
media. . .
Professor Paul Reiter, evidence to House of Lords committee, 2005
The following year, in 2005, came another of the rare occasions when leading spokes-
men for the ‘consensus’ were brought together with some of the world’s most promi-
nent scientific ‘sceptics’, this time in London, as witnesses called before the House of
Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs.
On one side, among others, were Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, Sir
John Houghton and Sir David King. Witnesses for the other side, at the insistence of
a minority of the committee, such as the sceptical Lord (Nigel) Lawson, included Dr
Richard Lindzen, Professor Ross McKitrick, Professor Niklaus Morner, a former presi-
dent of the International Commission on Sea Level Change (another highly sceptical
former contributor to the IPCC whose evidence had irked King in Moscow) and Pro-
fessor Reiter.
The two sides did not, of course, meet face to face, but gave evidence individually.
The representatives of the ‘consensus’, expounding the standard IPCC line and prais-
ing the value of its computer models, were clearly not pleased to see that prominent
sceptics would also be giving evidence. They went out of their way to disparage what
Houghton described as representatives of only the ‘very few’ scientists who disagreed
with the IPCC. They were, he said, ‘not seriously regarded’.
But the most revealing session was that featuring Professor Reiter, because, hav-
ing been a contributing author to the chapter of its 1996 report dealing with the ef-
fects of global warming on human health, he was able to give a unique insider’s view
of how the IPCC actually worked.
Reiter recalled how startled he had been to discover that almost none of his fel-
low contributors to the chapter were in any way qualified experts on its subject. One
had written a paper on health and cell phones, although his main interest was the ‘ef-
fectiveness of motor-cycle helmets’. None of the chapter’s lead authors had written a
research paper on insect-borne diseases and two of them were full-time ‘environmen-
tal activists’, one having written articles on land mines and mercury poisoning. Their
sole purpose, it emerged, was to produce a chapter showing how warming would
29produce a spreading of ‘vector-borne diseases’, as ‘predicted’ by an absurdly simplis-
tic computer model.
In vain had Reiter tried to explain that all serious science showed that there was no
evidence to support this view. But, sure enough, when he saw the finished chapter, he
was appalled to see how its ‘amateurish text’ was riddled with basic scientific errors,
reflecting only ‘the limited knowledge’ of its authors.
The IPCC had got what it was after. The Summary for Policymakers was able to
claim that ‘climate change is likely to have wide-ranging and mostly adverse effects
on human health, with significant loss of life’. After the report had been widely ac-
claimed as representing ‘the consensus of the world’s 1500 top scientists’, Reiter noted
how ‘eight out of nine major websites’ had put insect-borne diseases ‘at the top of
the list of adverse impacts of climate change, quoting the IPCC’. He described how he
had then been invited back to contribute to the IPCC’s 2001 report, but when he had
found that he and one other author were the only scientists with any knowledge of
insect-borne diseases at all, and that the other authors only wanted the same alarmist
story as before, he resigned.
For the 2007 report, as the world’s leading authority on the subject, he had actu-
ally been nominated to be a lead author by the US government. But this time he was
rejected. When he asked an IPCC official why, it turned out that she worked for the
UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre. She could only tell him that the selection of authors
was decided by ‘the governments of the world’. As Reiter told the House of Lords
committee, having comprehensively demonstrated the point, ‘consensus is the stuff
of politics, not of science’.
3010 The ‘consensus’ and the media
The BBC decides to break the law for the ‘consensus’
The BBC must do all it can to ensure that controversial subjects are treated with
due accuracy and impartiality in all its relevant output.
Statutory obligation under the BBC Charter, 2006
I found the seminar frankly shocking. . . I was frankly appalled at the level of
ignorance of the issue which the BBC people showed. It seemed to me that none of
them had shown even a modicum of professional curiosity on the subject. . . I spent
the day discussing the subject and I don’t recall anyone showing any sign of having
read anything serious at all’.
Richard D. North, after attending BBC seminar on ‘Climate Change: The Challenge
to Broadcasting’, 26 January 2006 40
Just as the entire scientific establishment was firmly in the grip of the ‘consensus’, so
were the Western media. In the US, every leading newspaper and journal, from the
New York Times and the Washington Post to Time and Newsweek, had become its fully
committed supporters, as had all its major television channels, NBC, CBS and ABC.
In Britain the picture was the same. Newspapers such as the Guardian, the Inde-
pendent and the Observer were such fervent evangelists for the cause that the only
way they differed from the IPCC orthodoxy lay in the zest with which they wanted to
push it even further, by eagerly printing every new global warming scare story that
came their way.
Often these originated from the main environmental campaigning groups, such
as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, which had become the ‘armed wing’ of
the global warming movement, constantly claiming that catastrophic climate change
was now advancing faster than even the IPCC had predicted, and urging govern-
ments to take much more drastic action.
Scarcely a single British journalist ever questioned this hysteria. But one excep-
tion was Rosemary Righter, the chief leader writer of the Times, who described to the
House of Lords committee a very peculiar conference of 200 scientists that had taken
place at Exeter University early in 2005. It had been staged at the behest of Tony Blair,
shortly due to host a meeting of the G8 governments, who planned to put global
warming at the top of its agenda. The gathering, she said,
31…became something like a contest between which horror stories – the Vanishing
Gulf Stream, Millions Dead of Malaria in the Midlands, the Parboiled Polar Bear
– would do the best job of making the public’s flesh creep. As spin for the gov-
ernment’s case that climate change is a threat greater than terrorism, this was
no doubt effective. As guidance to policy-makers, it was a disgrace. Tall stories
have no place at G8 summits. 41
In fact, far and away the most prominent publicist for such ‘consensus-plus’ alarmism
in the British media was the BBC, which had reported that conference in glowing
terms. And in January 2006, it went still further by staging behind closed doors a
very peculiar event of its own at its White City Television Centre.
What was later to become notorious as ‘the BBC’s secret seminar’ lasted a whole
day, and featured 28 of the BBC’s most senior executives, including the heads of tele-
vision and radio news, current affairs and ‘Vision’. They were all meeting to discuss
‘Climate Change: The Challenge to Broadcasting’, along with twenty-eight of what
the BBC Trust was to refer to in its 2007 report as ‘some of the best scientific experts’
on the subject.
The event’s resident organiser was one of the BBC’s chief environmental corre-
spondents, Roger Harrabin, who had long been familiar for his relentlessly one-sided
reports on climate change. Harrabin also ran a small outfit dedicated to changing
the way environmental stories were covered in the broadcast media, called the Cam-
bridge Media and Environment Programme, with funding from the WWF, the Depart-
ment for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the University of East Anglia. It
was through this body that Harrabin organised the seminar.
For a long time, the BBC tried to keep secret what had gone on at this meeting,
or who these ‘best scientific experts’ had actually been: apart from the fact that its
keynote speaker was Lord May of Oxford. Best known as an ecologist, he had for-
merly been a trustee of the WWF and President of the Royal Society, which under his
aegis between 2000 and 2005 had been transformed into another body relentlessly
evangelising for the warming cause.
May’s views were typified by his valedictory address to the Royal Society, when he
said:
…there exists a climate-change ‘denial’ lobby, funded to the tune of tens of mil-
lions of dollars by sections of the hydrocarbon industry, which was very similar in
attitude and tactics to the tobacco lobby that continues to deny smoking causes
cancer, or the curious lobby that denies HIV causes AIDS.
Only one dissenter had inadvertently been invited to the seminar: journalist Richard
D. North described, in the words quoted above, how ‘appalled’ he had been at the
complete ‘ignorance’ on the subject of everyone from the BBC to whom he had spo-
ken.
Only five years later did a search of the Wayback Machine, an archive of internet
web pages, finally reveal who those ‘best scientific experts’ in fact had been. Only
32three were active scientists at all, none of them climate experts (and one was head of
the university department at East Anglia which helped fund Harrabin’s propaganda
outfit). Virtually all the rest were professional climate lobbyists, ranging from emis-
saries of Greenpeace and the Stop Climate Chaos campaign to the ‘carbon dioxide
project manager’ for the BP oil company (which two years earlier had advertised that
its initials no longer stood for ‘British Petroleum’ but ‘Beyond Petroleum’, in an effort to
show that it was now as dubious about fossil fuels as any oil company could pretend
to be).
But the real significance of this meeting was that, on the advice of Lord May, the
BBC decided that it no longer need be troubled by its statutory duty under the BBC
Charter to report on ‘controversial subjects’ only with ‘due accuracy and impartiality’.
From now on it would argue that the scientific consensus in favour of man-made cli-
mate change was so overwhelming that there simply were no longer two sides to the
argument at all. What Lord May called ‘the climate-change denial lobby’ was now
so insignificant and discredited that it would be perfectly ‘accurate’ and ‘impartial’ to
ignore it altogether (although, to be fair, there had been little sign that this was not
the BBC’s policy already).
Four months later the BBC celebrated its new ‘freedom’ by launching what it called
its ‘Climate Chaos’ season: a whole series of programmes launched with a two-part
documentary starring the most revered of all its presenters, Sir David Attenborough,
entitled The Truth About Climate Change. Attenborough introduced himself as some-
one who had once been sceptical about man-made climate change, but now realised
that the evidence for it was ‘overwhelming’. What had changed his mind were the ‘cli-
matologists” graphs showing such a close correlation between rising carbon dioxide
levels and rising temperatures. He then ran through some examples of the terrify-
ing damage already being caused by global warming. Only the previous year there
had been the catastrophic devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, which a warming
world would now be likely to see much more of. There had also been a drought in the
Amazon so severe that it threatened the survival of the world’s largest rainforest. The
freak European heatwave in 2003, the ‘worst for 60 years’, had killed ‘27,000 people’,
and such events were predicted to become much more frequent. Ice in the Arctic was
disappearing so fast that it threatened the survival of polar bears. And it was said that
the speed at which Greenland’s ice cap was melting threatened such a catastrophic
rise in sea levels that, in his second programme, Attenborough was to claim that this
would flood much of southern Britain and wipe most of Florida and all of Bangladesh
off the map.
All these claims were familiar from climate activists. But had Attenborough con-
sulted any proper science he would have known that every one of them was a com-
plete travesty of the facts. Far from becoming more frequent, there were now fewer
Atlantic hurricanes than in the 1940s. The flooding of New Orleans was not due to
33global warming but the failure to maintain the levees that protected low-lying parts
of the city from the lake and river above them. Attenborough omitted to mention
that the 2005 Amazon drought had already been succeeded in 2006 by record rains
and flooding across the Amazon basin.
Meteorologists had explained that the 2003 heatwave had not been due to global
warming but to hot air sucked up from the Sahara by a prolonged high-pressure cell
over western Europe. And those ‘27,000’ deaths were much fewer than the numbers
commonly ascribed to excessive cold in European winters.
Studies had shown that summer temperatures in the Arctic were even higher at
the end of the warming period between 1920 and 1940 than they had become since.
It was estimated that, since the 1960s, polar bear numbers in parts of the Arctic Circle
had quadrupled. As for the melting of Greenland’s ice cap, Attenborough could have
discovered that this amounted to only seven one-thousandths of one percent of its
total volume, which evidence showed must have shrunk significantly more during
the Medieval Warm Period, when there were human settlements now buried under
feet of ice. As for those sea levels, they were currently rising by only 2 millimetres a
year and even the IPCC was predicting that, over the next century, they would rise no
more than 59 centimetres (23 inches).
The real point is that it never crossed the minds of Attenborough and the BBC to
do the research which could have shown them just how seriously adrift from the facts
they were. So hermetically sealed were they in their bubble that they wouldn’t even
have known where to look.
Altogether the BBC provided a perfect example of Janis’s three rules of group-
think. First, they had become caught up in a ‘narrative’ that bore no relation to ex-
ternal reality. Second, by talking only to those who agreed with the narrative, they
convinced themselves that this was the ‘consensus’ view with which all right-thinking
people agreed. Third, they then agreed, as was illustrated by their seminar, that those
who disagreed were so wrong-headed and few in number that they could legally be
ignored.
Later that year an even more striking example was to follow.
3411 Hysteria reaches its height
The inconvenient untruths of Mr Gore
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer,
warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is
plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine
and widespread rioting will spread across the world. . . deaths from war and famine
run into the millions, until the planet’s population is reduced by such an extent the
Earth can cope. Access to water becomes a major battleground. . . Rich areas like
the US and Europe would become ‘virtual fortresses’, to prevent millions of
migrants from entering, after being forced from land drowned by sea-level rise or
no longer able to grow crops.
The Observer, 11 November 2004 42
It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply amoral to question the seriousness of the
situation. The time for diagnosis is over. The time to act is now.
Gro Harlem Brundtland, 9 May 2007
Almost everywhere, climate denial now looks as stupid and unacceptable as
Holocaust denial.
George Monbiot, The Guardian, 21 September 2006
If one event more than any marked the moment when the global warming hysteria
reached its height, it was the launch in the summer of 2006 of the film designed to
spread the message to a worldwide mass-audience: Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
Cinemas were soon packed out to watch the highest-earning documentary in Hol-
lywood history, breathlessly acclaimed by the BBC’s Richard Black as ‘perhaps the
most terrifying movie of all time’. It was not only to win an Oscar but, for Gore, an
equal share with the IPCC in that year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Opening with shots of melting glaciers and those vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro,
Gore’s method was to round up every familiar global warming scare story so far de-
vised and then to exaggerate it still further.
His pièce de résistance, supposed to confirm the accuracy of the ‘hockey stick’ (so
cruelly traduced by ‘global warming sceptics’ who were now ‘diminishing as fast as
those mountain glaciers’), was to stand in front of a huge and even more terrifying
version of his own, which he claimed was based on ice cores taken from glaciers by
his ‘friend’ Dr Lonnie Thompson. This culminated in an upward tick so much more
dramatic than anything previously seen that Gore had to be hoisted up on a lift to
reach it.
35From there on audiences were treated to a graphic sequence of horror stores: po-
lar bears drowning as the Arctic ice melted, computer graphics showing how many of
the world’s most famous cities would disappear as sea levels rose by 20 feet, and the
world’s climate system thrown into chaos by floods, droughts, tornadoes and hurri-
canes like nothing ever seen before.
Little islands in the Pacific, like Tuvalu, would soon be vanishing beneath the waves.
The melting of the Himalayan glaciers, on which seven major river systems depended,
would eventually rob 40 percent of the world’s population of water. Global warming
would lead to a mass-extinction of species, which were already disappearing at a rate
‘1000 percent’ faster than before. There would be an explosion in the incidence of
malaria and other ‘vector-borne’ diseases, as rising temperatures allowed insects to
spread from the tropics over the globe.
This apocalyptic vision, Gore claimed, was now endorsed by ‘every climate scien-
tist in the world’ (apart of course from that tiny handful of sceptics who were ‘dimin-
ishing as fast as those mountain glaciers’). And in support of this he cited a recent
study by Naomi Oreskes, a lecturer in ‘the history of science’ and passionate believer
in the ‘consensus’ on climate change. According to Gore, she had analysed 928 ‘peer-
reviewed’ scientific papers dealing with climate change and found that the percent-
age expressing any doubts about the cause of global warming was exactly ‘zero’.
Scarcely a single statement in Gore’s film stood up to examination as being even
remotely true. Some such points have already been referred to: the shrinking of
the ice sheets on Kilimanjaro and Greenland; the science fiction projections of likely
future rises in sea-levels; the alleged increase in Atlantic hurricanes; the claim that
warming would bring a massive spread in insect-borne diseases.
One of the most laughable, however, was the blow-up temperature graph which
supposedly confirmed the accuracy of Mann’s ‘hockey stick’, and which Gore claimed
was based on Dr Thompson’s glacier ice-cores. For a start, a search of Thompson’s
work showed that his studies had only been concerned with measuring past precip-
itation, not temperatures. But still more damningly, it turned out that the only real
source for Gore’s graph was a slightly amended and exaggerated version of Mann’s
‘hockey stick’ itself. The only evidence Gore could produce to prove that Mann’s graph
was accurate was a version of the very graph he was defending.
Claim after claim, when measured against the scientific literature, simply fell apart:
from his alleged increases in floods, droughts and tornadoes to his claims about the
causes and rate of species extinctions. If the Himalayan glaciers were receding, this
was because of a pall of ash clouds from forests being burned in Indonesia to make
way for palm-oil plantations. Satellite observations showed that sea levels around
Tuvalu and other supposedly threatened Pacific islands, far from rising, had actually
been falling.
On nothing was Gore more embarrassingly caught out than his sequence showing
36polar bears supposedly drowning because global warming had melted the ice. This
was inspired by a picture taken in 2005 of four bears drowned, not by lack of ice, but
by an unusually severe storm off the coast of Alaska.
As for his use of Oreskes’ paper on ‘The scientific consensus on climate change’ to
claim that not one of her 928 papers had expressed doubt about the causes of global
warming, her study had in fact made clear that she based this only on the ‘abstracts’
of her sample. It was this which led her to claim that 75 percent of them endorsed
the ‘consensus’ that global warming was man-made. But subsequent analysis of the
papers found that only 905 had included abstracts, and of these only 13, or 2 percent,
explicitly endorsed anthropogenic climate change. The vast majority did not mention
it at all. 43
A superficial observer of the unbridgeable gulf between Gore’s film and scientific
fact might have been tempted to describe it as an exercise in ‘fraud’. But this would
be to imply that Gore had known very well what he was doing and deliberately set
out to deceive the public. Psychologically, however, this would be a crucial misun-
derstanding of how groupthink works. In making most of their film’s errors, Gore and
his production team would simply not have been aware of all the scientific studies
showing that their facts were wrong. They were not concerned with facts. Their sole
preoccupation had been with assembling a ‘narrative’, which they wished to be as
persuasive and powerful as they could make it.
The point is that, by definition, groupthink is never grounded in reality; it is a
belief-system. And the purpose of those caught up in it, and who are so convinced
of the moral rightness of their cause, is to convert others to share their beliefs. It is
not the real facts which matter; it is the pseudo-facts that can be used to make their
narrative seem most compelling.
It is in this way that, for any form of groupthink, the ends come to justify the
means. The most interesting chapter in Hitler’s Mein Kampf is that on ‘Propaganda’,
because it so well reflected the way in which the supreme purpose of any such belief-
system is to find the most effective way of uniting all those who already share it into
a seemingly irresistible ‘consensus’, and thus to win over others to their cause. This is
why groupthink always sees as its real enemies those who refuse to go along with it,
and who try to point out that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes.
Gore himself had earlier in the year compared scientists sceptical of the ‘consen-
sus’ with ‘members of the “Flat Earth Society”’ or with ‘the people who believe the
moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona’. But in the excitement
following the success of his film, the Guardian journalist George Monbiot picked up
from America a new and even more damning term for such people. To deny man-
made climate change, he wrote, now ‘looks as stupid and unacceptable as Holocaust
denial’.
Others had been branding ‘climate sceptics’ as ‘deniers’ as long ago as 2002. Lord
37May had spoken of ‘the climate-change denial lobby’ to those BBC executives at their
‘secret seminar’ in 2006. But equating them with the little bunch of neo-Nazi cranks
who deny the reality of Hitler’s death camps gave the term a wholly new, morally-
charged edge. From now on, to dismiss them all as just ‘deniers’ caught on like wild-
fire, precisely because it carried this new and venomous sub-text.
It was perhaps no coincidence that, two days before Monbiot’s article was pub-
lished, an American ‘green’ blog had given extravagant praise to his latest book. It
ended with this battle-cry:
When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are
really hitting us, and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimise the dam-
age, we should have war-crimes trials for these bastards, some sort of climate
Nuremberg. 44
One reason why supporters of the ‘consensus’ were finding new and more extreme
language to express their hostility was that the ‘deniers’ were now finding new and
more disconcerting ways in which to challenge them.
12
The story begins to change: dissenting voices
2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record.
UK Met Office press release, 4 February 2007
It is another nail in the coffin of the climate change deniers and represents the
most authoritative picture to date, showing that the debate over the science of
climate change is well and truly over.
David Miliband, UK Environment Secretary, at launch of the IPCC’s Fourth
Assessment Report, 2 February 2007
The Great Global Warming Swindle
At the start of 2007, it might have seemed that the ‘consensus’ was sweeping all be-
fore it more than ever. On 2 February, to unprecedented hype, the IPCC launched in
Paris the Summary for Policymakers for its Fourth Assessment Report. In every re-
spect this lavishly-produced document, co-written at the headquarters of his TERI
institute in Delhi by the IPCC’s chairman Dr Pachauri, went much further than any of
its predecessors. ‘Warming of the climate system’, it pronounced, was now ‘unequivo-
cal’. Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were now ‘the highest in at least 1300
years’. Polar ice and snow cover were in sharp decline. Sea levels were dangerously
rising. Hurricanes, heatwaves, floods and droughts were all becoming more frequent.
The Himalayan glaciers could be all-but gone by 2035. Droughts were threatening to
38destroy nearly half the Amazon rainforest, and by 2050 could have halved crop yields
across Africa.
Hours later, BBC television news led its early evening news with pictures of power
station cooling towers belching out ‘pollution’ (i.e. steam), cars submerged in flood-
water and a mass of ice calving from an Antarctic glacier, all stamped in red with the
word GUILTY. In a doom-laden but triumphant voice, the newsreader announced:
At 6 o’clock – there’s no doubt. Climate change is happening – and we are to
blame. Leading scientists predict that by the end of the century, some parts of
the world will be too hot to live in. As temperatures soar and sea levels rise, the
verdict from the world’s leading climate scientists: the human race is guilty of
global warming.
Among the world’s politicians who had been on hand to give the media all the sound-
bites they wanted was France’s President Jacques Chirac, claiming that the world was
now faced with such an ‘emergency’ that it was ‘at the doorstep of the irreversible’.
‘Half-measures’ were no longer enough. Another was the UK’s David Miliband, ac-
claiming the report as the ‘final nail in the coffin of the climate change deniers’. On
returning home he arranged for DVDs of Al Gore’s film to be sent for showing in every
secondary school in Britain. 45
In March 2007, at a meeting of the European Council, the heads of the EU’s 27 gov-
ernments unanimously agreed that they would act to stop global temperatures from
rising by more than 2 ◦ C, introducing a package of measures to show that the EU was
now ‘leading the world in the fight against climate change’. By 2020, it would have re-
duced its emissions of carbon dioxide by 20 percent. No less than 20 percent of all the
EU’s energy would by then come from ‘renewables’, such as wind, solar and ‘biomass’.
Ten percent of all transport fuel would be powered, not by fossil fuels, but by ‘biofuels’
made from crops such as wheat, maize, sugar beet and palm oil. And by 2010 the sale
of conventional incandescent light bulbs would be banned, to be replaced with low-
energy ‘compact fluorescent lamps’. Ironically, these contained significant quantities
of mercury, which five years earlier the EU had banned as a ‘hazardous substance’.
A few weeks earlier, however, millions of British viewers had been treated to an-
other film like nothing seen on television before. The Great Global Warming Swindle,
90 minutes long, brought together for the first time a whole array of leading ‘scep-
tical’ scientists to explain why they could not accept the ‘consensus’ view. These in-
cluded Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Paul Reiter and Dr Syun-ichi Akasofu, the former
head of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska. Dr Roy Spencer and Dr
John Christy had come to their sceptical view as the scientists in charge of one of
the official global temperature records measured by satellites, at the University of Al-
abama. 46 Other experts featured in the programme included Dr Nir Shaviv from Israel
and Dr Eigel Friis-Christensen from Denmark (a colleague of Dr Henrik Svensmark 47 ),
whose work had separately confirmed how crucially influential on the Earth’s tem-
39peratures and climate were fluctuations in the activity of the Sun; Dr Pat Michaels, a
senior US meteorologist and longtime prominent sceptic; Dr Karl Wunsch, a leading
US oceanographer; Dr Ian Clark, an expert on ice-cores; Paul Driesser, who had writ-
ten a book on how measures to combat climate change were damaging the lives of
millions of people in the Third World by holding them back from the use of fossil fu-
els which might help to lift them out of poverty; and Patrick Moore, a co-founder of
Greenpeace, describing why the scientific evidence had led him to change his mind. 48
So authoritatively did all these and other experts explain, from different angles,
why they believed that the IPCC had got it seriously wrong in assuming that rising
carbon dioxide was the chief cause of recent warming that the programme met with
a howl of outrage from advocates of the ‘consensus’. George Monbiot in the Guardian
savaged its contributors as ‘cranks’ talking ‘bunkum’, whose views had long been ‘dis-
credited’ by proper scientists. Hundreds of official complaints poured in to the broad-
casting regulator Ofcom, including one collection signed by ‘37 professors’ (including
Phil Jones of the CRU); another of 175 pages, supported by, among others, Bert Bolin;
and one from the IPCC itself, supported by Dr Pachauri and Sir John Houghton.
So vast was the mountain of complaints that it was to take Ofcom a year to pro-
cess them. But so strongly was Channel 4 able to support all it had said that the vast
majority were rejected. Ofcom avoided the main issue by claiming that, since the
science on global warming was generally accepted, the programme could not have
misled its viewers, as alleged. By way of modest concession, it did criticise Channel
4 on four minor procedural points (e.g. not allowing enough time for the IPCC to re-
spond to questions). It also ruled that what Dr Wunsch said on camera in his interview
had been shown ‘out of context’, and that Sir David King had been misrepresented as
having said precisely what he did convey to those MPs about Antarctica becoming
the only habitable place on the planet.
No sooner was the Ofcom report published than press statements were issued
from Pachauri, saying he was ‘pleased’ that Ofcom had ‘upheld most of the com-
plaints’ and the IPCC’s ‘credibility’ (wholly untrue); and Houghton, saying how pleased
he was that Ofcom has ‘recognised’ the film’s ‘serious inaccuracies’ (it had done noth-
ing of the kind). But this did not stop the BBC headlining its report on the ruling:
‘Climate documentary “broke rules”’.
In media eyes, the champions of the ‘consensus’ had spun victory out of a defeat.
But they were now becoming uncomfortably aware of a rather more serious threat to
their previously unchallenged ability to dominate the public ‘debate’.
40The rise of the ‘counter-consensus’
Global warming has become a symbol and example of the clash between truth and
propaganda. The one politically correct truth has already been established, and
opposing it is not easy. Yet a large number of people, including top scientists, see
the issue of climate change, its causes and its proposed consequences quite
differently.
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, Blue Planet in Green Shackles
Until the early years of the 21st century, the ‘consensus’ had enjoyed no more useful
an ally than the mainstream media. On both sides of the Atlantic, every leading news-
paper and television channel had long been so actively committed to the cause that
the ‘consensus’ exercised an almost total monopoly on information generally avail-
able to the public. Something was now happening, however, which was dramatically
changing the nature of the debate. This was the arrival of the internet. The nature of
the discussion was now being opened up in a way which a few years earlier would
have seemed unimaginable. This had effect in at least two obvious ways. One was
simply the colossal increase in the availability of information. At the click of a button it
was now possible to have instant access to tens of thousands of scientific papers, IPCC
and other official reports, data on anything from global temperatures to changes in
the extent of polar ice or the percentage of electricity being generated by windmills:
every kind of information which might formerly have taken days or even months to
obtain.
The other way in which the internet was beginning to add a whole new dimension
to the debate was the rise of a number of expert specialist blogs. These were allowing
informed technical discussions to take place with an intensity of interchange which
not even scientific journals could emulate. It was here, for instance, that in 2003 Steve
McIntyre had, on his website, first begun revealing his discovery of the startling tech-
nical flaws in the ‘hockey stick’. This so irked Michael Mann and his colleagues that,
the following year, with the aid of a PR firm that specialised in representing ‘liberal’
causes, they launched a blog of their own, RealClimate, to counter McIntyre’s charges.
Calling themselves the ‘Hockey Team’ – they included Gavin Schmidt and Phil Jones,
the men in charge of the official global surface temperature records – they liked to
claim that they were the ‘real’ climate scientists, while McIntyre and McKitrick should
be ignored as just unqualified ‘amateurs’. This in turn prompted McIntyre to counter-
attack by launching his own regular blog, Climate Audit. The trouble was that, in his
own field of expertise, statistics, McIntyre was able to run rings round them, as he
continued to dissect each new trick these members of the IPCC establishment tried
to play.
In 2007 McIntyre teamed up with another new blog, Watts Up With That?, run by a
Californian meteorologist, Anthony Watts. Watts’ particular concern at this time was
41to check out every one of the thousands of weather stations across the US which
provided temperature data to the US and Global Historical Climatology Networks
(GHCN). The vast majority of these stations, this research revealed, did not begin to
meet the official requirements for reliability, because they were situated on heat-
absorbing asphalt, near airport runways, heated buildings or heat-emitting machin-
ery such as air-conditioning units. Their measurements were thus being significantly
distorted. Yet these same weather stations contributed a quite disproportionate share
of the data used to compile the two global surface temperature records, GISS and
HadCRUt, on which the IPCC and governments relied for their picture of how much
the world was warming.
These findings led McIntyre to investigate the temperature records maintained
for the US Historical Climate Network by Hansen and Schmidt at GISS. Here he made
the startling discovery that these had been systematically ‘adjusted’, to make older
temperatures look cooler and more recent temperatures higher than those actually
recorded. The GISS website, for instance, now showed that 1998 was the hottest year
in the US record, and that five of the hottest years ever recorded had been since 1990.
But the originally measured data had shown that 1934 was significantly warmer than
1998, and that four of the hottest years in the record were in those same ‘dustbowl’
years of the 1930s.
McIntyre then moved on to look at what GISS had been doing with temperatures
in the Arctic. A paper published by Hansen in 1987 had shown that temperatures
there too had been higher in the 1930s than at any time since. 49 But again these had
now been given the same two-way ‘adjustment’, to show recent years as having been
comparatively much warmer than the originally recorded data justified.
To track this down did not need any knowledge of ‘climate science’. As with the
‘hockey stick’, it simply required the expertise to uncover what key supporters of the
‘consensus’ were doing with the electronic evidence. In groupthink terms, this yet
again confirmed just how dubious the methods being used to support their theory
were too often turning out to be. What was more generally happening at this time,
with the aid of the internet, was that experts from outside the ‘consensus’ were com-
bining their information to form a kind of informal ‘counter-consensus’ to the ortho-
doxy that had ruled the roost ever since the great alarm over global warming had
been launched on its way in 1988.
At the end of 2007 a minority report from the US Senate Environment Commit-
tee was able to list and quote more than 400 scientists from 20 countries around
the world, many past or current contributors to the IPCC, who were now prepared
to express their dissent from the ‘consensus’, sometimes in the strongest terms. They
included Nobel prizewinners and academics from many of the world’s leading uni-
versities, such as Harvard, MIT, Princeton and London, in disciplines ranging from cli-
matology, oceanography and physics, to biology, geology and chemistry. They even
42included members of the National Academy of Sciences and employees of NASA and
the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Several admitted that, having previously been supporters of the ‘consensus’, the
evidence had now led them to change their minds. Many testified to the pressure
they and like-minded colleagues had been under not to make their dissenting views
known. Not the least distinguished of them was Dr Syun-icho Akasofu, formerly direc-
tor of the International Arctic Research Center, who wrote that ‘the method of study
adopted by the IPCC is fundamentally flawed, resulting in a baseless conclusion’.
In early 2008, an unprecedented conference was staged in New York by the Heart-
land Institute, a US free-market think-tank, bringing together hundreds of scientists
from a wide range of disciplines, along with policy makers such as the President of
the Czech Republic (quoted above). It was accompanied by a massive report, edited
by Dr Fred Singer and compiled by 30 international scientists making up the ‘Non-
governmental Panel on Climate Change’.
Particularly under fire in this report and throughout the conference was the sig-
nal failure of the predictions made by IPCC computer models to be borne out by what
were now 18 years of real-world evidence. One particular example analysed was the
headline claim in the IPCC’s 1996 report that the most telltale ‘fingerprint’ of global
warming would be a rise in the temperature of the upper levels of the tropical tro-
posphere. Satellite measurements had since consistently shown that no such ‘finger-
print’ existed. Virtually all the rise in temperatures had been seen, not in the tropo-
sphere, but near the earth’s surface. This had been confirmed as early as 2000 by the
National Academy of Sciences. Yet two subsequent IPCC reports had ignored this evi-
dence that one of the more important predictions of its computer models was wrong.
At the end of the conference, those present endorsed a ‘Manhattan Declaration’
that, as the presence of so many reputable scientists had demonstrated, the claimed
scientific ‘consensus’ on the extent and causes of global warming did not exist. They
agreed that no convincing evidence had been produced to show that the climate
was being influenced by man-made carbon dioxide rather than natural factors such
as solar radiation and shifts in ocean currents, and that the hugely costly measures
being adopted by governments in response to an imaginary problem would have no
effect on the climate. The declaration ended by calling on world leaders to reject the
position on climate change represented by the IPCC. 50
For the British media, despite the standing of the more eminent scientists present,
it was as if this conference had never taken place. But equally they seemed wholly
oblivious to something of worldwide significance which was happening right under
their noses.
All the five official records were showing that global temperatures had, between
2007 and 2008, dropped by around 0.7 ◦ C. This was equivalent to the entire net rise
in world temperatures recorded through the whole of the 20th century. Even when,
43later in 2008, the temperature rose again, it became obvious that this did not alter
the overall trend for the previous nine years. The records all still agreed that 1998
had been the hottest year in recent times, but that temperatures had then fallen; and
since then, despite yearly fluctuations, the trend line had not risen at all. Two things
about this were particularly significant.
The first was that 1998 had coincided with an unusually strong El Niño, and this
had been followed by a La Niña, bringing a sharp drop in 2000. In 2006 there had been
another rise, again coinciding with a strong El Niño, followed in 2007–8 by another
strong La Niña and that marked drop in temperatures. Thus it seemed that by far
the most obvious influence on the climate during the previous ten years had been
nothing to do with carbon dioxide at all. It had been those fluctuating shifts in the
world’s ocean currents; in other words, a factor that was entirely natural.
Just as significant, therefore, was that none of this had been allowed for by those
IPCC computer models on which the whole alarm over global warming ultimately
rested. They had projected that, as carbon dioxide continued to rise, so warming
would increase through the 21st century, by an average of 0.3 ◦ C per decade. So far
nothing of the kind was happening.
As ever more people were coming to realise, climate models were looking in the
wrong place for the causes of climate change.
13
Groupthink and wishful thinking
Britain’s Climate Change Act, 2008
As soon as a new dogma is implanted in the mind of crowds it becomes the source
of inspiration. . . The sway it exerts over men’s minds under these circumstances is
absolute. Men of action have no thought beyond realising the accepted belief,
legislators beyond applying it’.
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd
It does not explain the unilateral and monstrous act of self-harm – or rather, the act
of harm inflicted upon industrial Britain by Parliament – that was the Climate
Change Act.
Nick Timothy, Conservative Home, 5 April 2016
There is no more important key to understanding the nature of groupthink than to
recognise the extent to which, because it is not rooted in reality, it is invariably based
on some form of make-believe or wishful thinking. Those caught up in groupthink
always have a view of the world, not as it really is, but as they imagine or would like
it to be. That is why they only prefer to mix with others who share their view and
44remain so selective in the evidence they choose to accept. And it is because they
cannot defend their beliefs against verifiable facts that they need to be so ruthlessly
dismissive of anyone who produces evidence that seems to contradict them.
A good example of this in September 2008 was the BBC’s response to Channel 4’s
The Great Global Warming Swindle : a three-part documentary series called Earth: The
Climate Wars. Presented by a geologist as an ‘objective’ look at the whole global
warming issue, the first and third programmes were standard restatements of the
‘consensus’ orthodoxy. But the real purpose of the series lay in its second programme,
which set out to discredit some of the scientists who had taken part in Channel 4’s
documentary, including Dr Fred Singer and Dr Roy Spencer. This it did, first, by show-
ing brief clips of interviews they had given at the Heartland conference. These were
each carefully edited to make the scientists out of context look ridiculous, by show-
ing them make some seemingly provocative point but without showing that in each
case they had immediately continued with an explanation of how the point was sci-
entifically justified.
The highpoint, however, was a wholly propagandist account of the ‘hockey stick’,
complete with film of the presenter hugging one of Mann’s famous bristlecone pines.
This culminated in a bizarre sequence showing a huge poster of Mann’s graph plas-
tered over the side of an advertising truck, being wheeled triumphantly past Buck-
ingham Palace, the Tower of London, Piccadilly Circus and all the major tourist spots
of London.
At no point did the presenter give his baffled viewers any hint of what critics might
have said to make this graph so controversial, and this was noted by many of the hun-
dreds of letters sent to the BBC complaining about the programme’s bias. Every one
of these complaints, of course, was rejected. But what made this noteworthy was the
way these rejection letters confirmed more explicitly than ever the curious formula
the BBC had devised to justify excluding from its output anything which appeared to
contradict the ‘consensus’.
‘BBC News currently takes the view’, the letters ran, ‘that their reporting needs
to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is
man-made’. In order ‘to avoid bias’, the BBC Editorial Guidelines now said that all its
coverage must conform with ‘mainstream science’. To allow airtime to those differing
from the mainstream would only give audiences a false impression by implying that
‘the argument was evenly balanced’. In the name of avoiding bias, therefore, the BBC
was thus ruling that its coverage should be as biased as possible.
A month later there followed another striking example of how far those in posi-
tions of influence in British life had become carried away by groupthink, the practical
implications of which were immeasurably more serious. This was an extraordinary
event which took place that October in the House of Commons.
Back in 2005, when David Cameron became Conservative leader, looking for new
45policies which could show his party ‘going green’, a young woman called Bryony Wor-
thington, the climate campaign director for Friends of the Earth, saw her opportu-
nity. She suggested to Cameron that his party should propose a radical new ‘climate
change law’, which would commit Britain, uniquely in the world, to cutting its carbon
dioxide emissions by 60 percent. 51
By 2007 Labour’s environment secretary David Miliband had got wind of this and,
still carried away by his excitement over the IPCC’s latest report, he did not wish to
be politically outflanked. He first invited Ms Worthington to join his department, to
advise on ‘climate change education’, and then invited her to play a leading role in
drafting the legislation needed to put her proposal into law.
By 2008 the resulting Climate Change Bill, to commit Britain by 2050 to cutting its
‘carbon emissions’ by 60 percent of their 1990 level was going through Parliament,
virtually without opposition. It had already been through two of its three readings
when Miliband was promoted to become foreign secretary. His brother Ed Miliband
was put in charge of a new ministry, the Department of Energy and Climate Change,
and it was he who came to the Commons on 29 October to pilot the Bill through
its third reading. At the last minute he was talked, by Worthington and others, into
amending the Bill to raise its carbon dioxide reduction target to 80 percent.
It was evident from the scores of speeches through a six-hour debate that not a
single MP had the faintest idea of how in practice such a target could be met. This
was simply not discussed, even though in reality it could only be achieved by closing
down virtually the whole of Britain’s fossil-fuel-dependent economy.
Only two MPs questioned the need for such a law at all, and only one, the former
Conservative Cabinet minister Peter Lilley, raised the matter of its cost. Based on the
original 60 percent target, this had been estimated by the government at £205 bil-
lion, which would make it far and away the most expensive law ever passed through
Parliament.
But its estimate of the benefits flowing from the Bill was only £110 billion. In other
words, MPs were being asked to vote for a Bill which even the government’s own
figures showed would cost almost twice as much as any benefits it might bring. And
because the change from 60 to 80 percent had only been made at the last minute, no
cost–benefit estimate for the new target was yet available.
Just before the final vote was taken, Lilley drew to the House’s attention that, out-
side in Parliament Square, snow was falling, the first known in London in October for
74 years. Their heads filled only with the happy belief that they were doing their bit
to save the planet from runaway global warming, 463 MPs voted for the Bill. Only five
voted against. Not one of the MPs who had now voted, all-but unanimously, for by
far the most costly piece of legislation in British history could have begun to explain
how its aims might be achieved, except by shutting down Britain’s economy. It was
an overwhelming example of the power of collective make-believe.
46Even if Britain did reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by more than four-fifths
within 42 years, this would not have the slightest effect on total global emissions, to
which Britain was by now contributing only 1.6 percent, at a time when China was
adding more than this to the total every year.
Only five months later did the government publish its revised cost-benefit analy-
sis for meeting the new 80 percent target. This showed that the cost of the Climate
Change Act might now be £404 billion, nearly twice the original estimate, averag-
ing out at up to £18 billion every year until 2050 (equivalent to £720 a year for every
household in the land). But the new figure for the benefits of the Act was now calcu-
lated to have risen nearly tenfold to £1,024 billion. It then emerged that the govern-
ment’s reason for this was that most of these benefits were not to be enjoyed by the
people of Britain themselves but by the world as a whole.
In every respect, because of the unimaginable scale of its implications, this had
shown Britain’s politicians having been led into a collective flight from reality greater
than any that can be recalled in the country’s history.
Climategate and Copenhagen
The more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of a policy-making
in-group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking will be
replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanised
actions directed towards out-groups.
Irving Janis, Introduction to Groupthink
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a
travesty that we can’t.
Kevin Trenberth email to Michael Mann, 9 October 2009
Those British politicians were not alone. Just when the Climate Change Act was being
passed, the world was entering another freezing winter, in a year which had begun
with record snowfalls across the Northern Hemisphere. In the US the early months of
2008 had caused it to be known as ‘the winter from hell’. There had been unfamiliar
snow and cold even in Saudi Arabia and the deserts of Iran. By 2009 it was ten years
since global temperatures had shown any warming trend.
But preparations were now in full swing for the next great UNFCCC conference,
due in Copenhagen in December 2009, to agree a new treaty to halt global warming
much more stringent than the Kyoto Protocol it was intended to replace.
For months in the run-up to Copenhagen the Western media ran with a flow of
stories on new scientific studies purporting to show that the consequences of global
warming were now ‘even worse than previously predicted’. But on November 19, out
47of the blue, came the anonymous release across the internet of more than 1000 emails
and 3000 other documents from the database of the University of East Anglia’s CRU.
These shed such damaging light on the activities of the little group of scientists at the
heart of the IPCC that what they revealed was almost immediately dubbed ‘Climate-
gate’.
The Climategate files reflected the three key ingredients of groupthink: the shak-
iness of its relation to factual evidence; the crucial need therefore to preserve the
illusion of a ‘consensus’; and how this then leads to what Janis called the ‘irrational
and dehumanised’ hostility displayed to anyone daring to challenge it.
They revealed for a start the tortuous lengths to which these scientists at the heart
of the ‘consensus’ had been prepared to go in manipulating the data to support their
‘narrative’; most conspicuously in the case of using ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ to ‘hide the
decline’. In addition, the CRU’s computer files were shown to be in a chaotic state, and
many had been ‘lost’.
But the emails then showed the remarkable degree of hostility towards anyone
who disagreed with them. Polite requests for background data that might explain
how particular conclusions had been arrived at were flatly refused, on the grounds
that this would only be used to undermine those conclusions. 52 When, in 2008, yet
another request for data had been put in to CRU, this time under the Freedom of
Information Act, Jones warned the little circle of scientists that, in breach of FOI law,
they should delete hundreds of emails that might be potentially embarrassing. 53
These tiresome outsiders, and particularly the critics of the ‘hockey stick’, had to
be silenced or discredited by any available means. This applied not only to McIntyre
but also to Soon and Baliunas † and also to John Daly, who, even before McIntyre pub-
lished his analysis of the computer tricks used to compile his graph, had separately
published a weight of other scientific evidence to confirm that the Medieval Warm
Period had indeed existed. When Daly died in Australia in 2004, Jones emailed Mann
to say that the news of his death was ‘cheering’.
The emails revealed the efforts the group had made to keep any papers dissent-
ing from the ‘consensus’ out of the scientific journals. In the case of those journals
that had published the Soon/Baliunas and McIntyre/McKitrick papers, they had dis-
cussed ways whereby either their editors might be ejected from their posts, or that
the journal itself might somehow be ostracised by the scientific community.
Finally, one of the last of the emails in October 2009 (quoted above) showed how
frustrated the little group had become by their inability to explain why global tem-
peratures were no longer continuing to rise as their models had predicted. This was
Trenberth’s plaintive admission that it was a ‘travesty’ that ‘we can’t account for the
lack of warming’.
†
48
See p. 24.Just a fortnight after Climategate first burst into the headlines, politicians repre-
senting 180 countries, led by President Barack Obama, joined 100,000 other people
in Copenhagen, including officials, scientists, green pressure groups, climate activists
and commercial lobbyists seeking to exploit the ever-growing bonanza of subsidies
available to investors in ‘low-carbon’ projects. It was the largest international confer-
ence since Rio in 1992.
But, as inches of snow fell on the freezing city outside, the atmosphere in the
mammoth conference venue became ever more heated, fractious and despondent.
For reasons that might have been predicted as far back as Kyoto, the new global treaty
that had been planned for so long was just not going to happen. There was never
going to be agreement on a deal even more one-sided than Kyoto. On one hand
the new treaty would have committed the ‘Annex 1’ Western countries not only to
making drastic cuts in their carbon dioxide emissions but at the same time to pay
out hundreds of billions of dollars to the ‘developing’ Annex 2 nations to assist them
in moving towards ‘low-carbon’ economies. On the other, those developing nations,
led by China and India, might be happy enough to accept the money. But in no way
would they agree to curbing their own emissions in return.
From a fortnight of bitter wrangling, little more emerged than an agreement that
they should all meet again in a few years’ time to have another go: Copenhagen was
a fiasco. Groupthink might have led them all to agree on the righteousness of their
cause, but when this ran up against hard economic realities, it was shown to have
been no more than a colossal act of collective wishful-thinking.
14 Where did the ‘consensus’ get its ‘facts’?
The IPCC studies only peer-reviewed science.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, 1 November 2009. 54
In the space of just a few weeks, the hitherto seemingly impregnable fortress of the
‘consensus’ had been dealt two hammer blows. The failure of Copenhagen was im-
possible to hide, although the BBC’s chief environment correspondent Richard Black
managed, on the BBC’s website, to ascribe the blame for it on eight different factors,
ranging from the EU and President Obama’s distraction by US television schedules to
the snow falling on the conference centre. But he omitted to mention the one over-
riding reason why its failure had long been wholly predictable. The real significance
of Climategate was widely missed by the media, not least because so few journalists
were aware just how far the little group of scientists responsible for the emails had
been, more than any others, responsible for promoting the global warming cause at
the heart of the IPCC establishment. But, in the weeks that followed, for a very differ-
49ent reason, the IPCC itself became the focus of a series of revelations which threat-
ened more than anything before to undermine its authority.
Both the IPCC and its supporters had long made no more insistent claim than that
it relied only on ‘peer-reviewed science’: on papers which had supposedly been ap-
proved by other independent experts in the field as being soundly based and credi-
ble. In fact, a study in 2008 of the key chapter in the 2007 report on ‘understanding
and attributing climate change’ showed that it had been written by just 53 authors,
of whom 60 percent came from research units in the US and Britain that were firmly
committed to the ‘consensus’ cause (including no fewer than ten from the Hadley
Centre). Most had co-authored papers with each other or favourably ‘peer-reviewed’
each other’s work. 55 When the media and politicians spoke reverentially of IPCC re-
ports as being the work of ‘1500 climate scientists’, it was in essence only these 53 they
were referring to, because everything else in those reports was meant to depend on
their findings.
But now a series of detailed investigations brought to light something even more
unexpected about the sources the 2007 report had drawn on to support some of its
most widely-publicised claims. Many of these, it turned out (all from Working Group II
on the ‘impacts of climate change’), had not been based on peer-reviewed research
at all. They had been taken from propaganda material put out by climate activists and
environmental pressure groups. In fact, the first of these scandals, dubbed ‘Glacier-
gate’, had begun to break two days before the Copenhagen conference opened. It
was reported from Delhi that the Indian government had commissioned the coun-
try’s most respected glaciologist, Dr Vijay Raina, to look into the 2007 report’s startling
claim that Himalayan glaciers were retreating so fast that, by 2035, most could have
disappeared. When Raina stated that this prediction had no scientific foundation
whatever, Dr Pachauri responded that his opinion was ‘voodoo science’, and stood
by the IPCC’s claim.
But it wasn’t until January 2010 that there emerged the full story of where this
prediction originated. It had first appeared in an interview given to a small environ-
mental magazine in 1999 by an obscure glaciologist, Dr Syed Hasnain. From there
it had been quoted in 2005 by the WWF, and it was this group that the IPCC cited
as its source. Even before the report was finalised, an IPCC lead author, Dr George
Kaser, had apparently dismissed the prediction as ‘so wrong that it is not even worth
discussing’. But it was published anyway. It also emerged that in 2008 Pachauri had
appointed Hasnain to head a new glaciology unit at his TERI institute in Delhi. 56
Next to come to light, as ‘Amazongate’, were the origins of another of the 2007 re-
port’s most widely-publicised claims: that global warming was threatening to destroy
40 percent of the Amazon rainforest. Again the WWF had been cited as the source,
but in fact the ‘40 percent’ figure had first appeared in a propaganda leaflet produced
in 1999 by a little Brazilian environmental group linked to the WWF. And even here,
50the ‘40 percent’ prediction had not been attributed to global warming at all, but to
damage being done by logging and man-made fires.
This was followed by ‘Africagate’, centred on another widely quoted prediction:
that droughts caused by global warming could by 2050 lead to a halving of African
crop yields. This turned out to have been sourced to a single paper by a Moroccan
academic, who claimed that he had based it on reports for three North African gov-
ernments. But none of these had in fact said anything of the kind. One had even
forecast that crop yields might actually rise.
Each of these three claims had not only been highlighted in Pachauri’s Summary
for Policymakers, but were among the most widely quoted in the media coverage
given to the report. The BBC had immediately given them pride of place on its web-
site, in a guide to ‘Climate change around the world’.
The resulting stir prompted a diligent Canadian journalist, Donna Laframboise,
to invite readers of her blog to co-operate in checking out every single source given
for statements in the 2007 report. Her 40-strong team discovered that, of the 18,531
scientific references cited in the report, no fewer than 5,587, nearly a third, had not
been peer-reviewed academic studies at all, but were ‘newspaper and magazine arti-
cles, discussion papers, MA and PhD theses, working papers and advocacy literature
published by environmental groups’. 57
No one had more often been quoted as insisting that the IPCC reports relied only
on unimpeachable ‘peer-reviewed science’ than Pachauri himself. But it was further
revealed that, thanks to the worldwide prestige he enjoyed as IPCC chairman, he had
been able to expand his little Delhi research institute, TERI, into quite an empire, with
branches in Washington, London, Abu Dhabi and several countries in south-east Asia.
He had also been given advisory positions with more than 20 organisations, ranging
from world-ranking international banks and corporations, to two carbon trading ex-
changes benefiting from the multi-billion dollar trade in buying and selling ‘carbon
credits’, and finally to several universities, including Yale, which appointed Pachauri
to head its new Climate and Energy Institute.
Pachauri, famous in India for his $1,000 suits and his expensive home in the most
exclusive residential enclave in Delhi, was quick to protest that none of all the money
given for his advisory services was paid to him personally, but had all gone to his
institute. 58 In recent years however, the head of the IPCC had cut an increasingly ec-
centric figure, as when he called for the world to give up eating meat, because the
methane given off by the digestive system of farm animals made as great a contri-
bution to global warming as all the world’s transport. Naturally, when details of his
wide-ranging commercial activities were revealed, no one was quicker to leap to his
defence than the BBC, which published a laudatory profile. But this failed to give any
details of the startling expansion of his TERI empire, or the impressive array of organ-
isations which had paid for his services.
51Not all the efforts of Pachauri’s allies to defend him, however, could obscure the
fact that the extraordinary prestige previously accorded to the IPCC had for the first
time been very seriously dented. The question now was: how would the ‘consensus’
establishment defuse the crisis?
15
Groupthink defends its own
The inquiries into Climategate and the IPCC
It is especially important that, despite the deluge of allegations and smears against
the CRU, this independent group of utterly reputable scientists have concluded
that there was no evidence of any scientific malpractice.
Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, on the Oxburgh
report into Climategate emails, 14 April 2010
There was no doubt that the ‘climate establishment’ was badly winded by the double-
whammy of Climategate and the scandalous revelations about the IPCC. In February
2010 Phil Jones temporarily stepped down as director of the CRU, and said that he
had ‘several times’ thought about committing suicide. A few days later, when he was
interviewed by the BBC, Roger Harrabin very unusually let it be known that some of
the questions he wanted to ask had been suggested to him by ‘climate sceptics’.
This led to Jones’s startling admission that, since 1995, there had been ‘no statisti-
cally significant global warming’; and furthermore that the rate of warming in earlier
years, between 1860 and1880 and 1910 and 1940, had been ‘not statistically different’
from that between 1975 and 2009. 59
But this apart, it did not take long for the authorities to mount a classic estab-
lishment response to the crisis. No fewer than eight separate official inquiries were
launched into Climategate, five in America and three in Britain, one by the Commons
Science and Technology Committee, the other two by the University of East Anglia
itself.
First to report were the MPs, all but one of whom seemed to be firmly lined up
with the ‘consensus’, as indeed did almost all the witnesses they interviewed. 60 Un-
surprisingly, the MPs reported that ‘the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and
CRU remains intact’. The emails did not ‘challenge the consensus that global warming
is happening and is induced by human activity’. There was no reason why Professor
Jones should not resume his post.
The members of the second inquiry to report, known as the ‘Independent Science
Assessment Committee’ and set up by the UEA, were again almost entirely firm sup-
porters of the ‘consensus’. It was chaired by Lord Oxburgh, who had various financial
interests in ‘low carbon’ energy, including his presidency of the Carbon Capture and
52Storage Association. He was also a member of GLOBE, a shadowy international body
set up to co-ordinate efforts to push the ‘consensus’ cause by members of an array of
national parliaments.
Oxburgh’s inquiry seemed a curiously perfunctory affair. Its researches involved
only two brief interviews of Jones, and examination of ten mostly uncontroversial
papers, almost certainly chosen by Jones himself. Again, its brief report found ‘no
evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice’ and that the CRU’s work had been
‘carried out with integrity’. Jones’s team had been ‘objective and dispassionate in their
view of the data and their results’. There was ‘no hint of tailoring the results to a partic-
ular agenda’. ‘Their sole aim’ had been ‘to establish as robust a record of temperatures
in recent centuries as possible’.
The third inquiry, the ‘Independent Climate Change Email Review’, also set up
by the UEA, was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, a former senior civil servant, now vice-
chancellor of Glasgow University. It did not report until July 2010, and again found
that the ‘rigour and honesty’ of the CRU scientists were not in doubt. They had not
tried to suppress criticism; and the key data needed to replicate their findings had
always been freely available to any ‘competent’ scientist. No sooner was this report
published than Jones returned to his post.
The only seriously dissenting voice on any of these panels had been that of a
Labour member of the Commons committee, Graham Stringer, a trained scientist
who, before becoming an MP, had worked as an analytical chemist. Following the
other two inquiries, he wrote a minority report to say that the serious issues raised by
the Climategate emails should have merited ‘independent and objective scrutiny by
independent panels. This has not happened’.
‘No reputable scientist who was critical of the CRU’s work’ had been on either of
the scientific panels; and ‘prominent and distinguished critics were not interviewed’.
These and other failings had left ‘a question mark against whether CRU science is
reliable’. The Oxburgh panel had not looked at the ‘CRU’s controversial work on the
IPCC, which is what has attracted most serious allegations’. ‘Russell did not investigate
the deletion of emails.’ All in all, Stringer concluded, ‘we are now left without a clear
understanding of whether or not the CRU science is compromised’.
But that, of course, had been the whole purpose of the exercise: to avoid focussing
on any of the real key points at issue, to ensure that the scientists were cleared of any
serious criticism, and to produce reports which could then be quoted by supporters
of the ‘consensus’ (as indeed they very widely were), to show that the entire Climate-
gate furore had been found by ‘independent experts’ to be just a fuss about nothing.
And, in keeping with the principles of groupthink, Stringer’s fellow MPs ruled, very
exceptionally, that his dissenting comments should be excluded from their final re-
port. 61
Less obviously one-sided in terms of damage limitation was the response of the
53international scientific establishment to the flaws brought to light in the IPCC’s 2007
report. Indeed, so blatantly incorrect was its prediction about the disappearing Hi-
malayan glaciers that the IPCC itself had already withdrawn it. But the main task of
investigating the IPCC was given to a panel set up by the Interacademy Council, rep-
resenting 15 of the world’s leading scientific bodies. These included the US National
Academy of Sciences and Britain’s Royal Society.
When this panel reported in August 2010, it did identify a good many failings in
how the IPCC was run, recommending significant changes. The process of ensuring
that scientific sources were properly peer-reviewed should be tightened up. Indeed,
the panel had even carried out its own analysis of those cited in the Third Assessment
Report of 2001. This found that only 84 percent of papers cited by Working Group
I had been peer-reviewed. The figure for Working Group II was even lower, just 50
percent. That for Working Group III was a mere 30 percent.
The report also recommended a reorganisation of the IPCC’s top management
structure, with a clear hint that Pachauri himself should stand down. But this was not
to happen until February 2015, for reasons wholly unconnected with the IPCC. 62
At least it was likely that the IPCC’s fifth report, due to appear in 2014, would not
repeat the more glaring mistakes which had been so embarrassing in its two prede-
cessors. In this respect, at least the ‘consensus’ was learning to be rather more cau-
tious.
16
Aftermath of the crisis, 2010–2014
The story now enters a new phase. In 22 years it had risen to two climaxes. The first,
between 2005 and 2007, was the time when the propaganda claims made for the
‘consensus’ had been at their most reckless, as in Gore’s film and the IPCC’s 2007 re-
port. The second came in the winter of 2009/10, when the ‘consensus’ for the first
time ran into real difficulties, with Climategate, Copenhagen and the exposing of the
errors in that same IPCC report.
Over the next five years, between 2010 and 2014, the story was to unfold in a
markedly lower key. At a series of lacklustre annual UNFCCC conferences in Cancun,
Durban, Doha, Warsaw and Lima, the climate establishment laboriously tried to sal-
vage something from the wreckage of Copenhagen, attempting to devise some for-
mula whereby the aborted treaty could be revived. The target for this was a new
mega-conference planned for Paris in 2015. Meanwhile, in 2014, the IPCC’s Fifth As-
sessment Report was noticeably more restrained in its claims than any of its prede-
cessors.
But we now look at some of the ways in which, during these years, supporters
of the ‘consensus’ tried to keep their cause alive, still exemplifying each of the three
rules of groupthink.
54Janis’s Rule 1: failure to connect with reality
A major problem for the ‘consensus’ by this time was the continued failure of global
temperatures to rise as its computer models had predicted. Even the IPCC recognised
what had become known as ‘the pause’. All the official data still showed 1998 to have
been the warmest year in recent times, since when, allowing for fluctuations up and
down, there had been no trend at all.
Against this background, one of the more significant tactics used to suggest that
the impacts of global warming were still getting worse was to claim that it was caus-
ing a marked increase in floods, droughts, heatwaves and hurricanes. It was also
said that there were other signs that the world’s climate system was becoming ‘more
chaotic’.
Those ‘extreme weather events’ we’d seen before
This game had, of course, been played previously, as with the 2003 European heat-
wave and the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. On each occasion it was widely
claimed that such events were now becoming more frequent and intense, although
neither in fact had yet been repeated. Since 2005 Atlantic hurricane activity had
been at its lowest level for decades, and although 2003 had seen the hottest day ever
recorded in Britain, that summer had been nothing like the months of prolonged heat
experienced in the drought year of 1976.
But 2010 brought a rash of further ‘extreme weather events’, each claimed to have
been ‘unprecedented’, from a heatwave in western Russia to disastrous floods in Pak-
istan and Queensland. These were all seized on as further evidence of ‘dangerous
climate change’. Referring to each of these examples in July 2011, the British govern-
ment’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, a population biologist, proposed
that politicians should ‘use such climate-related disasters overseas to persuade British
voters to accept unpopular policies for curbing carbon emissions’. 63 He was clearly
unaware that a paper in Geophysical Research Letters had already demonstrated that
no significant warming trend could be discerned in that part of Russia over the pre-
vious 130 years. Similar studies had pointed out that, far from the floods in Pakistan
and Queensland being unprecedented, significantly worse had been experienced, in
Pakistan in 1929 and in Queensland in 1974. 64
Beddington also referred to a more recent drought in the Horn of Africa, described
as ‘the worst for 60 years’. Unfortunately, the IPCC’s 2007 report had predicted that,
due to climate change, that region would in future get wetter.
In October 2012 there was much excitement among politicians and the media
over ‘Hurricane Sandy’, as it turned upwards from the Caribbean towards the north-
eastern US coast. This was forecast as likely to generate an ‘unprecedented storm
surge’, thanks to ocean warming and rising sea levels caused by climate change. In
55fact, by the time ‘Sandy’ made US landfall, it had weakened to only a Force 1 extra-
tropical storm; and historical records showed that the New England coast had experi-
enced seven greater storm surges in the past, all before 1960 and going back to 1635.
Even pillars of the climate establishment were becoming wary of ascribing ‘ex-
treme weather events’ to climate change. In 2013 an editorial in Nature pronounced
that ‘better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to
global warming’. A ‘Special Report on Extremes’ published by the IPCC the same year
similarly concluded that there was ‘high agreement’ that ‘long-term trends’ in ex-
treme weather events could not be ‘attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate
change’. 65
How that ‘vanishing Arctic ice’ failed to vanish
There was no more conspicuous example of the way groupthink is unable to recog-
nise any evidence that contradicts its chosen narrative than the obsessive attention
that had been given to the state of ice in the Arctic (along with the supposedly threat-
ened survival of those, in fact, non-disappearing polar bears).
Satellite measurements since 1979 had recorded an overall declining trend in the
extent to which the ice was melting in late summer. Two professors, Wieslaw Mal-
owski in California and Peter Wadhams of Cambridge, had been in the forefront of
warning, on the basis of computer models, that, after its summer melt, the Arctic
would soon be ‘ice free’.
When in September 2007 the ice shrank to its lowest point yet, they predicted that
the ice would all be gone ‘by 2013’. The following July, the Independent devoted its
entire front page to announcing that this could happen by September that year. But it
was just then that the ice began a dramatic recovery. 66 By the end of summer 2012 the
ice-melt again broke the record, with the remaining ice thinner than ever. Wadhams
now predicted that it would all be gone ‘by 2016’. But by 2014 measurements made
by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) showed that the ice extent was not only
back to where it had been in 2006, but had also thickened on average by 33 percent.
In June 2016 Wadhams was to publish a book entitled Farewell to Ice. Under such
headlines as ‘Arctic could be ice-free for first time in 100,000 years, claims leading
scientist’, he was quoted as predicting that by that September it could have shrunk
to an area of ‘less than 1 million square kilometres’. But by 10 September, when the
ice began re-freezing at its earliest date since daily records began in 1987, its smallest
extent had been 4.1 million square kilometres. This was more than four times larger
than Wadhams’ prediction.
Yet again what the carbon dioxide-obsessed computer modellers failed to allow
for were the natural factors that had brought about similar warming of the Arctic in
the 1930s. This resulted from warm water pushing up into the Arctic, the result of a
56shift in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which had correlated before with fluc-
tuations in Arctic sea temperatures.
Still more significantly, what the groupthinkers also consistently tried to ignore
was that the relative decline in the extent of Arctic summer ice had been more than
counter-balanced by the steady growth in both the extent and volume of sea ice in
Antarctica, at the other end of the earth. 67 This meant that, by 2014, there was sig-
nificantly more polar ice in the world than there had been at any time since satellite
observations began in 1979. But wasn’t the point about this ‘warming’ that it was
meant to be ‘global’?
Why the Met Office’s Unified Model got it so wrong
Another body which attracted increasingly quizzical attention in these years was the
UK Met Office. Few official institutions had played a greater part in evangelising for
‘consensus’ groupthink, ever since John Houghton, as a passionate convert to the
belief in ‘human-induced climate change’, became its director back in the 1980s.
In 1990, when he was already the most influential figure at the top of the IPCC,
Houghton, as we know, had set up the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, which,
along with the University of East Anglia’s CRU, was responsible for one of the two main
official global surface temperature records. The predictions made by its computer
models helped to play a very significant part in shaping the IPCC’s reports.
In 2010 the Met Office’s chief scientist, Julia Slingo, told the Commons Climate-
gate inquiry that its new £33 million super-computer was not only responsible for
predicting future global temperatures as far ahead as 2100, but also for its shorter-
term weather forecasts for the UK. 68 This was what she proudly called the Met Office’s
‘Unified Model’. But even before 2010, its forecasts had become conspicuously un-
reliable. In 2004 the Hadley Centre produced a report entitled Uncertainty, Risk and
Dangerous Climate Change. This predicted that over the next ten years, global tem-
peratures would have risen by 0.3 ◦ C. Four of the five years after 2009 would be hotter
than 1998. Not only would heatwaves like that in 2003 become more frequent, but
by 2040 more than half of all European summers were ‘likely to be warmer than that
of 2003’ and ‘by the 2060s a 2003-type summer would be unusually cool’. 69
In early 2007 global warming hysteria was at its height. The new chairman of the
Met Office, Robert Napier, previously a director of the UK branch of WWF, was saying
that it would be the ‘warmest year ever’. This was just before global temperatures
temporarily plummeted by 0.7 ◦ C. That summer in the UK, it forecast, it would be ‘drier
than average’, just before some of the worst summer floods in living memory.
The Met Office’s Unified Model consistently predicted ‘hotter, drier summers’ and
‘warmer than average’ winters for 2008–2010, three years when much of the Northern
Hemisphere endured record winter cold and snow, and while the UK had summers
that were wetter and cooler than usual. The Met Office’s prediction of a ‘barbecue
57summer’ in 2009 was famously followed by three months of unusual rain. In Octo-
ber 2010 the Unified Model predicted that Britain’s winter would be up to ‘2 degrees
warmer than average’, just before the coldest December since records began in 1659.
In late 2011 the Met Office website forecast that global temperatures would rise
over the next five years by up to 0.5 ◦ C from their 1971–2000 average. This prediction
was so embarrassingly off-beam that, only a year later, it was quietly removed from
the website, replaced with one predicting that the flat-lining temperature trend since
1998 was ‘likely to continue’. In March 2012 it forecast that Britain’s spring would, yet
again, be ‘drier than average’, just before the wettest April on record. In the autumn
of 2013 it predicted that the winter months would be ‘drier than average’ just before
the wettest three months for 84 years brought disastrous flooding to Somerset and
the Thames Valley. 70
In 2014 it was finally possible to check on the accuracy of that ten-year forecast
of global temperatures the Hadley Centre had made in 2004. Instead of the world
having warmed by 0.3 ◦ C, as predicted, the temperature trend according to the satel-
lite record had not risen at all. Far from four of the five years after 2009 having been
hotter than 1998, this still stood as warmer than any year since.
Again, the chief reason why the Met Office’s Unified Model had got it all so spec-
tacularly wrong was that it was programmed to assume that the chief factor deter-
mining temperatures and climate was the continuing rise in carbon dioxide. Hence
all those ‘hotter, drier summers’ and ‘warmer than average’ winters.
Yet so powerful was the mindset which had the Met Office in its grip that it could
not recognise why it had made such a breathtaking series of errors. In its 2014 annual
report, its new chairman announced that the Met Office was now buying a new £97
million super-computer, to replace their five-year-old £33 million version. This, he
said, would not only enable their ‘integrated weather and climate model, known as
the Met Office’s Unified Model’ to ‘produce the most accurate short-term forecasts
that are scientifically possible’. It would also be able to predict even more accurately
how the Earth’s climate was likely to change over the next 100 years.
The extent to which, blinded by its obsession, the Met Office had so long contin-
ued to repeat such errors, should have become a national scandal. As a body cost-
ing the taxpayers £220 million a year, with its chief scientist alone receiving nearly
£240,000, the politicians might have been expected to ask how it could claim to de-
serve this money. But so far from reality had the MPs themselves been carried by
the same groupthink that the Met Office was allowed to carry on without ever being
called to account. 71
Janis’s Rule 2: preserving the illusion of ‘consensus’
With all the new problems which had arisen for the ‘consensus’ in recent years, it had
become more than ever important to maintain the impression that virtually ‘all the
58world’s scientists’ still believed that global warming was caused by human agency.
‘97 percent of climate scientists believe in man-made global warming’
This need to assure the world that only an insignificant handful of scientists did not
agree with the climate orthodoxy had already prompted a first response back in 2008,
when the Washington Post, the Guardian and others trumpeted a new survey which
had found that ‘97 percent of climate scientists’ agreed with the ‘consensus’ on man-
made warming. This was said to be based on questioning ‘10,257 Earth scientists’.
But when the evidence for this claim was looked into, it turned out not to be quite
what all those headlines had suggested. For a start, the survey was the work of a
master’s degree student at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of her super-
visor. She had indeed originally approached ‘10,257 Earth scientists’, but it was then
decided that many of these represented disciplines which did not qualify them to an-
swer, including physicists, geologists, astronomers and experts on solar activity (who
might have believed there was a connection between global warming and the Sun).
So the original number of those approached was winnowed down to 3,146.
Those who remained were then asked two questions. First, did they accept that
the world had warmed since the pre-industrial era. It might have been hard to find
any reasonably well-informed person who disagreed with this, but even so 10 percent
of them did so.
Secondly, did they believe that human activity had ‘significantly’ contributed to
this warming’? When only 82 percent said they did, this was not considered to con-
vey quite the required impression of an overwhelming ‘consensus’. So the sample was
winnowed down still further until the researchers were left with just 77 respondents
who (a) described themselves as ‘climate scientists’ and (b) had recently published
peer-reviewed papers on climate change. When 75 of the 77 gave the required an-
swer to the second question, this provided the ‘97 percent’ figure which won all those
headlines (although it amounted to only 0.7 percent of the ‘10,257 earth scientists’
originally approached). 72
As these details emerged, they aroused so such mockery that in 2012 a group
of highly committed advocates for the orthodoxy, including a journalist from the
Guardian, decided to come to the rescue of the ‘97 percent’ claim with what they
called ‘The Consensus Project’. The lead author of the paper which resulted was John
Cook, an Australian with a PhD in psychology, who in 2011 had published a book
called Climate Change Denial: Heads In The Sand and was co-founder of a blog called
Skeptical Science, dedicated to ‘getting sceptical about global warming skepticism’.
This time the team had searched the internet for the abstracts of papers published
since 1991 that mentioned ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. Naturally it
didn’t occur to them to allow for the fact that the overwhelming majority of stud-
ies published during that time could only have won their funding if they endorsed
59the ‘consensus’ view. But their trawling produced 11,944 abstracts including those
phrases, which they then divided into eight categories. These ranged from ‘explicit
endorsement with quantification’ at the top, shading all the way down to ‘explicit re-
jection with quantification’ at the bottom.
7,980 of the abstracts expressed ‘no position’. This left 34 percent of the papers
still remaining. The overwhelming majority of these, 33 percent of the total, fell into
one of the three categories which endorsed the belief that ‘greenhouse gases lead to
warming’. 33 percent of that 34 percent thus gave Cook and his colleagues the ‘97
percent’ figure they wanted.
On closer examination, however, this claim began to look ever more curious. The
vast majority of the abstracts included in the 33 percent figure consisted of (a) those
that had only agreed that human emissions were making some ‘unquantified’ contri-
bution to global warming; and (b) those that merely agreed that greenhouse gases in
general contribute to warming ‘without explicitly stating that humans are the cause’.
These two categories were so vague that it would have been hard to disagree with
either. But when it came to papers which fell into the top category, by ‘explicitly’
stating that ‘human beings are the primary cause of recent global warming’, these
numbered only 65: just 1.6 percent of all those giving a position. Yet it was only by
adding all these figures together that they could be translated into the claim that ‘97
percent of climate scientists agree on climate change’ which made headlines around
the world: not least when, on 16 May 2013, President Obama tweeted ‘Ninety-seven
percent of scientists agree climate change is real, man-made, dangerous’. The Cook
paper had, of course, shown nothing of the kind. But a more accurate reflection of
the survey’s findings, that ‘1.6 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are the
primary cause of global warming’ would have won no coverage at all.
Obama was followed by his Secretary of State John Kerry, who used the ‘97 per-
cent’ finding to call for the American public to be ‘pounding on the doors of Congress’
to act: referring to ‘global perils such as drought, floods, wildfires, threatened coast-
lines, disease risks and more’, and adding ‘the danger we face could not be more real.’
And the ‘97 percent’ figure continued to be quoted all over the place for years to
come. Not since the ‘hockey stick’ had the believers in man-made warming been
given such seemingly powerful evidence to support their cause.
If you don’t support the ‘consensus’, you fail your exams
In few areas of life had the ‘consensus’ groupthink come to exercise a more command-
ing position than in Britain’s education system, where almost an entire generation
was now being instructed as if no view other than that the future of the planet was
threatened by man-made climate change existed.
In April 2014, as a newspaper columnist, I was sent a General Studies paper set
to A’ Level students the previous year by the leading official exam body, AQA. Candi-
60dates were asked to discuss 11 pages of ‘source materials’ on climate change. These
included excerpts from a whole set of documents, ranging from the IPCC’s 2007 re-
port to an article from the Guardian, all promoting the ‘consensus’ view.
One item quoted the Met Office predicting that ‘even if global temperatures only
rise by 2 ◦ C, 30–40 percent of species could face extinction’. A graph from the US En-
vironmental Protection Agency showed temperatures having soared in the past cen-
tury by 1.4 ◦ C, twice the generally accepted figure. The only hint that anyone in the
world might question such statements was an article by an environmental correspon-
dent for the Daily Telegraph, Louise Gray (who had previously worked for WWF). This
quoted a paid PR man for the cause, Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute, dismissing
‘climate sceptics’ as ‘a remnant group of dinosaurs’ who ‘misunderstood the point of
science’.
In reporting all this I commented:
In the days when one purpose of education was to teach people to examine the
evidence and to think rationally, any bright student might have had a field day,
showing how all these extracts were no more than one-sided propaganda. But
today one fears they would have been marked down so severely for not coming
up with the desired answers that they would have been among the tiny handful
of candidates given an unequivocal ‘fail’.
In response I had an email which could not have more vividly confirmed this. It came
from the mother of just such a student, who she described as ‘an excellent scientist’
who had scored ‘straight As’ on all his science papers. But he was also ‘very knowl-
edgeable about climate change and very sceptical about man-made global warming’.
His answers to the General Studies paper, questioning the reliability of each of its
source materials, were given an ‘E’, the lowest possible mark. This seemed so implau-
sible that the mother paid £60 for his paper to be ‘independently’ re-marked. When
his manuscript was returned it was found to have been ‘articulate, well-structured
and clearly well-informed’. But again he was marked down with an ‘E’ for fail. 73
Until a decade or two earlier, it would have been unthinkable in Britain that such
a capable boy would not have been given high marks for showing how he was bright
enough to think for himself. But so rigid now was the grip the groupthink had come to
exercise over Britain’s education system that any student failing to parrot its mantras
could expect to be given lower marks than anyone else in the class.
Janis’s Rule 3: dissent from the ‘consensus’ can no longer be
tolerated
We end this section with three more examples of how hostile advocates of the ‘con-
sensus’ had now become to anyone outside the groupthink bubble. The first leads on
61neatly from that school exam paper because it also played on the pressure to enforce
‘correct thinking’ in Britain’s schools.
Deniers must be ‘eliminated’
One of the defining characteristics of groupthink, as Janis puts it, is that it is ‘likely
to result in irrational and dehumanised actions directed towards out-groups’. There
could not have been a better unconscious illustration of this tendency than a little film
launched in October 2010 for showing in Britain’s cinemas and across the internet.
No Pressure was made for 10:10, a campaign urging everyone in 2010 to cut their
personal ‘carbon footprint’ by 10 percent.
The film’s ‘creator’ was one of Britain’s most successful comedy scriptwriters and
directors, Richard Curtis, best-known for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and
Love Actually, and as a co-founder of BBC televison’s hugely popular annual fund-
raising exercise for charity, Comic Relief.
The video opened with a gushing school teacher, played by a well-known actress,
Gillian Anderson, telling her class that there was a ‘brilliant idea’ going round, that
people should cut their ‘carbon emissions by 10 percent’, to keep ‘the planet safe for
everyone’. She asks the class what they might think of doing for the cause, particularly
pleased with one girl who says she will be cycling to school instead of coming by car.
‘Fantastic, Jemima!’.
‘No pressure’, the teacher gushes on, ‘but it would be great to get an idea of how
many of you are going to do this’. It seems as if every hand has been raised, until she
notices that Philip and Tracy have refused to join in. Smiling on, she says ‘absolutely
fine, your own choice’ and prepares to end the lesson – until she remembers some-
thing, ‘Oh, just before you go’, she says, reaching under the papers on her desk, ‘I just
need to press this button’. She does so and Philip and Tracy explode into fragments
all around the room, showering blood and body parts over the desks and white shirts
of their horrified fellow pupils.
Scene two, showing the equally ingratiating headmaster looking down on a hall-
full of older pupils, is like a shorter repeat of scene one. Again, all the pupils except two
raise their hands. Again, ‘no pressure’ and the button is pressed, again showering the
other horrified students with blood. Scene three switches to David Ginola, then the
well-known manager of Tottenham Hotspur (a football club which supported 10:10),
on a practice pitch with his players. Again, when only he among his team shows no
interest in cutting his ‘carbon emissions’, he is blown to smithereens.
No weirder advertisement for the ‘consensus’ cause had ever been devised. No
sooner was it released than uproar broke out across the internet. Even many ‘environ-
mentalists’ expressed shock and dismay, protesting that the film had gone way over
the top. Within 24 hours it had been pulled off the air. Nevertheless, the Guardian did
its best to defend the video, reporting that ‘many people on our comment threads
62and Twitter thought the pantomime gore in the film was hilarious’, and pointing out
that at least it had won ‘global’ publicity for their cause. Indeed, all those involved in
making the film must themselves have agreed that this was a really amusing way to
put over their vital message. After all, ‘deniers’ were so dangerously mistaken on this
central moral issue of our time that it could surely not be wrong to imagine them – of
course only in a perfectly harmless, playful way – being literally wiped off the face of
the earth.
The BBC attacks the ‘deniers’
No British institution had been more relentless in pushing a propagandist line on all
issues related to climate change than the BBC. Essentially its position was not dissim-
ilar to that held by the makers of No Pressure. But in general its policy, as formalised
after that ‘secret seminar’ in 2006, was that anyone or anything appearing to contra-
dict the ‘consensus’ narrative should be rigorously ignored in its coverage. In 2010,
however, after all the negative publicity recently given to the cause, the BBC decided
that it was time once again to go on the attack against these ‘deniers’. Among the
results were the two remaining examples in this section. 74
The first was a special hour-long edition of the BBC’s flagship science programme,
Horizon, entitled Science Under Attack, broadcast in January 2011. For their front-man
they chose one of the chief figureheads of Britain’s scientific establishment, Sir Paul
Nurse, a molecular biologist, who was not only a Nobel prizewinner but also the new
president of the Royal Society.
Nurse’s case throughout the programme was that, although ‘the vast majority of
climate scientists’ accepted man-made global warming, there were still ‘deniers’ or
‘denialists’ who refused to believe them. These people were now dangerously leading
the public to lose trust in science (Nurse cited a poll finding that 50 percent of US
voters now disbelieved in anthropogenic warming).
The programme’s first aim therefore was to show the ‘deniers’ as being wholly
without credibility, which it did by means of a technique already familiar from Climate
Wars. This was to film interviews with two ‘deniers’, Dr Fred Singer and the journalist
James Delingpole, who had first popularised the term Climategate, until brief clips
could be extracted which, shown out of context, could be used to make them look
ridiculous.
Dr Singer, the distinguished and ageing atmospheric physicist, was filmed chat-
ting with Nurse in a New York diner, until he offered one example of the kind of evi-
dence which seemed to confirm that solar activity had more influence on climate than
carbon dioxide. He referred to data from stalagmites in ‘a cave in the Arabian penin-
sula’. ‘A cave in the Arabian peninsula?’ Bingo! Nurse had just the clip he wanted.
This immediately cut to a sequence in which Nurse loftily contrasted Singer’s sin-
gle eccentric example with the way proper scientists like to look at all the data on
63a subject, to get an overall picture, instead of just ‘cherry picking’ one example on
which to base some peculiar theory. 75
Nurse then demonstrated what he meant by proper science by interviewing a
computer-modeller from NASA, who waved aside any idea that solar activity could
have been a ‘primary factor’ in recent warming by saying that this simply did not
‘match up with evidence’. But then, in the most revealing passage in the programme,
Nurse asked his NASA expert to quantify the relative contributions of carbon dioxide
to the atmosphere by human and natural causes. The reply was that human activity
was now emitting ‘7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide’ each year. But only ‘1 gigatonne’
was emitted by the oceans, volcanoes and all other natural sources.
This answer seemed so extraordinary that Nurse asked him to repeat his claim
that human emissions were now seven times greater than emissions from all natural
sources put together. In reality, of course, this was a truly remarkable claim, since it is
generally agreed that the total amount of carbon dioxide annually emitted into the at-
mosphere is not eight gigatonnes but some 186 gigatonnes. Of this, 100 gigatonnes
(57 percent) is given off by the oceans, and 71 gigatonnes (38 percent) by animals.
The 7 gigatonnes emitted by human activity thus represent not seven-eighths of the
total but barely 3 percent.
But Nurse had got just the statistic he wanted even though, as baldly put to his
viewers, it could not have been more ludicrously misleading. In fact, as elsewhere in
the programme, Nurse gave little sign that he understood very much about climate
science at all (as when at one point he said that he had ‘read somewhere’ that the
planet had warmed by 0.7 ◦ C in the past century). The only real effort made to justify
his title, Science Under Attack, was a sequence defending the CRU at East Anglia (the
university Nurse himself had attended) over the Climategate emails.
This he did by allowing Professor Jones to explain why it had been entirely legiti-
mate for the CRU to ‘hide the decline’ by the ‘trick’ used to get its temperature graph
to show the ‘hockey stick’ shape that was wanted. On this and everything else re-
vealed by the emails, as Nurse was quick to emphasise, four ‘independent’ enquiries
had ‘found no evidence of deliberate scientific malpractice’.
The real message of the programme was how it exemplified another familiar fea-
ture of the global warming ‘debate’. This was the striking disparity between the un-
questioning deference generally accorded to any scientists speaking for the ‘consen-
sus’, and the very different treatment given to anyone who could be dismissed as just,
to quote the Wikipedia entry on Dr Singer, ‘an advocate for climate denial’. 76
It was particularly noticeable how useful to the ‘consensus’ were scientists, like
Nurse, holding some senior post in the scientific establishment. They could lend the
‘prestige’ of their position to the cause, even though their own scientific expertise
all too often gave them no authority to do so. Just as this was so evident in Nurse’s
programme, so had it been in the bizarre pronouncements on climate issues by his
64predecessor as president of the Royal Society, the population biologist Lord May. May
had also been a chief scientific adviser to the government, where he was succeeded
by Sir David King, the surface chemist, and Sir John Beddington, another population
biologist. Away from their own fields of expertise, as each of these men had abun-
dantly demonstrated, they had no professional qualifications to pronounce on cli-
mate science whatever. Yet, thanks solely to the prestige attaching to their positions,
they could each be used to propagandise for the groupthink party line as what Lenin
liked to describe as ‘useful idiots’.
The BBC tells itself that it needs ‘more bias’, not less
Later that year there followed as bizarre an example of the power of groupthink to in-
vert reality as any described in these pages. Because there had been so much talk of
‘BBC bias’, the BBC Trust, its governing body, had commissioned an ‘independent’ re-
port on The Impartiality and Accuracy of the BBC’s Coverage of Science. The man chosen
to write this was Professor Steve Jones, another geneticist, with a special interest in
snails, who had also worked often for the BBC. Although only seven pages of Jones’s
102-page report were devoted to the BBC’s coverage of climate change, it became
clear from its advance publicity, under headlines such as ‘Sceptics get too much air-
time, BBC told’, that this was its key message. And it turned out that this was indeed
the most important of Jones’ findings: that the BBC had been giving too much cov-
erage to ‘climate deniers’ and should in future keep them off the air. This was bizarre,
since the essence of the BBC’s policy had so long been to give those dissenting from
the ‘consensus’ as little airtime as possible, and certainly they should never be given
the opportunity to explain properly the reasons why they disagreed with it.
Jones made no secret of his own views, repeatedly talking of ‘denialism’, ‘denial-
ists’ and ‘deniers’. He described those outside the ‘consensus’ as a ‘deluded minority’,
whose views were similar to those of astrologers, believers in alternative medicine,
and even those who held that the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers had been ‘a US
government plot’.
Other features of his report were even more surprising. One was how little Jones
seemed to know about the BBC’s coverage of climate issues. He referred only to a
handful of programmes and the little he said about even these suggested that he
had relied on a briefing supplied by others rather than having watched them himself.
In criticising the BBC’s readiness to ‘give space’ to ‘deniers’ to make statements
which ‘are not supported by the facts’, he mentioned as examples Earth: Climate Wars
and Science Under Attack. He seemed unaware that the reason why they had been
featured in those programmes was not to let them explain their views but to subject
them to a hatchet job.
Jones was equally casual about his facts in referring to various recent controver-
sies in the climate story. He poured scorn, for instance, on how ‘deniers’ had used ‘a
65single mention in a report about Himalayan glaciers’ as evidence of ‘a conspiracy to
exaggerate the impact of greenhouse gases’. This seemed an odd way to describe the
huge row which had arisen over just one of the serious errors discovered in the IPCC‘s
2007 report, one which even the IPCC itself had realised was so indefensible that it
had withdrawn the passage.
Jones seemed similarly hazy over the facts when he claimed that a survey of ‘thou-
sands of earth scientists’ had shown that ‘97 percent of specialists in atmospheric
physics’ agreed that human activity played a significant part in causing global warm-
ing.
Almost the only aspect of Jones’s report which perhaps should not have been
surprising were various technical errors of his own, such as his misunderstanding of
the debate over climate ‘feedbacks’, which showed how completely unfamiliar he was
with even the basics of climate science.
But naturally, both the BBC Trust and the BBC Executive welcomed his ‘key find-
ings that our coverage of science is impartial, accurate and of high quality’. When it
came to apportioning ‘due weight’ to different views, they agreed that there might
be a case for tightening up the editorial guidelines still further. In other words, the
BBC authorities agreed that, far from their coverage of climate change being biased,
it should perhaps, in the name of ‘impartiality’, be made even more so. Not for noth-
ing had George Orwell based his ‘Ministry of Truth’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four on his time
working for the BBC. 77
In the years between 2011 and 2014, as the temperature ‘pause’ continued, so the
temperature of the debate over climate had become much less obviously feverish
than in the previous decade. The IPCC’s noticeably more restrained Fifth Assessment
Report, published in dribs and drabs between 2013 and 2014, attracted significantly
less media coverage than any of its predecessors. Despite storm Sandy in 2012 and
the storms and floods in the UK in January 2014, much of the heat had also gone out
of efforts to stoke up alarm over ‘extreme weather events’.
But attention was now beginning to turn to the UNFCCC’s next mammoth climate
conference, planned for Paris in December 2015. Here it was hoped that the nations
of the world would at last succeed in signing a new version of that binding treaty
they had so signally failed to agree on at Copenhagen in 2009. As the fateful date
approached, however, there was another highly revealing episode which, but for the
all-pervading groupthink, should have attracted much more widespread attention
than it did.
6617 Prelude to Paris: ‘adjusting’ the facts to fit the
theory (again)
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
Apocryphally attributed to John Maynard Keynes
Apocryphal though this remark often attributed to Keynes may have been, it does
completely reverse one of the common characteristics of groupthink. With group-
think, it is the belief that remains unshakeably the same. If anything needs to be
changed, as we saw with the ‘hockey stick’, it has to be the facts.
It was no coincidence that in January 2015, with ten months to go before the Paris
conference, a flurry of exultant headlines proclaimed that 2014 had been ‘the hottest
year on record’. From Scientific American and Time to the BBC and the Guardian, it
was reported that startling new figures from the two most prominent global surface
temperature records showed that 2014 had been even warmer than 1998. To under-
stand the background to this we must recall that the main official records of global
temperatures were derived from two different sources. Some are based on readings
from thermometers situated on land and at sea. Others are based on readings from a
global network of satellites and weather balloons. As we know, the two leading sur-
face records were Gistemp, published by GISS, and HadCRUt, jointly compiled by the
UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Professor Jones’ CRU. Both were of course prepared
by leading advocates for the ‘consensus’. 78 Of the two satellite records, one came from
a department of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, run by Roy Spencer and John
Christy, both ‘climate sceptics’, and the other from a company contracted to NASA,
Remote Sensing Systems (RSS).
Until 1998, the surface and satellite records had remained generally in step with
each other, but since then they had increasingly diverged. The surface records had
consistently shown temperatures that were running rather higher than the satellites.
Since 1998 GISS, in particular, had shown the temperature trend continuing to rise.
But the satellite record, on the other hand, showed the trend flat-lining. Long be-
fore 2014 there had been puzzlement over this divergence between the surface and
satellite records.
One factor which might have helped to account for it, analysed in detail by McIn-
tyre, Anthony Watts and others, was that, in the years after 1990, there had been a
dramatic drop in the number of weather stations on which the global surface record
was based (from more than 6000 to fewer than 1500). Of the much smaller number of
stations which remained, a much higher proportion were sited in built-up areas or at
airports, where their data would be affected by the ‘urban heat island’ effect (which
other studies had shown could result in temperatures up to 1 ◦ C or more higher than
those in rural areas). Furthermore, over 80 percent of the earth’s surface, including
67vast areas of Russia, Africa, Canada, Antarctica and 90 percent of the oceans, were
not covered by instrumental readings at all. 79
The satellite coverage on the other hand was significantly more comprehensive.
Not only did it cover the entire globe, but it also constantly took readings at different
levels of the atmosphere (hence the finding that there was no evidence for that IPCC-
predicted ‘fingerprint’ of warming in the upper troposphere).
In January 2015 the puzzlement over the divergence of the surface and satellite
records increased, with that rash of reports claiming that 2014 was now ‘the hottest
year’ on record. This was because the satellite records were still showing 1998 as sig-
nificantly warmer than any year since. This was the greatest divergence between the
surface and satellite records so far.
But it then emerged that something very odd had been going on with the surface
records on which this new claim was based: the data for the two El Niño years 1998
and 2010 had been significantly altered. The previous version of HadCRUt, known
as HadCRUt 3, had shown 1998 as 0.07 ◦ C warmer than 2010. But a new HadCRUt 4
version was now showing that its figure for 1998 had been adjusted downwards and
that for 2010 upwards, to give completely the opposite impression. 80
In fact, this new claim that 2014 was now even warmer still than 1998 had been
particularly based on even more dramatic new figures from GISS. This prompted an
expert UK-based blogger, Paul Homewood, to investigate one of the areas of the
globe where GISS was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost any-
where else: a huge chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay. When
Homewood looked at a very large area of Paraguay that was covered by only three
rural weather stations, he was startled by what he found. In each case GISS was now
reporting that, between 1950 and 2014, there had been a steep temperature rise of
1.5 ◦ C: more than twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th cen-
tury. But the archived data giving the temperatures originally recorded during those
decades had not just shown no rise: they had shown a cooling trend, amounting to a
full degree!
The way this had been done became only too clear. In each case, temperatures
given for the earlier years had been retrospectively ‘adjusted’ downwards from those
originally recorded, while more recent temperatures had been ‘adjusted’ upwards.
Thus had the picture given by the original data been turned upside down. Yet these
new figures had now been fed into the global temperature record most often relied
on by scientists and politicians the world over. Homewood therefore widened his
search to a much larger area of South America. Again he found that similar two-
way adjustments had been made, to create the impression of a warming trend not
present in the original recorded data. He then turned his attention to the data for
all the weather stations round a stretch of the Arctic Circle between 52 ◦ W in Canada
and 87 ◦ E in Siberia (this was the part of the Arctic most affected by the recent influx
68of warmer water from the Atlantic). Again, in every instance, GISS had adjusted the
older data downwards and that for more recent years upwards, by as much as 1 ◦ C or
more. 81
In fact, Homewood was far from alone in making such discoveries. Similar findings
were being made by diligent researchers across the world, from Russia, Iceland and
Ireland to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Almost everywhere, it seemed,
the pattern was the same: older temperatures were being cooled, more recent values
raised. Examination of data from specific weather stations in Australia revealed that
an 80-year cooling trend equating to 1 ◦ C per century had been transformed into a
warming trend of 2.3 ◦ C. In New Zealand, a considerable public row had broken out
when ‘unadjusted’ data showing no trend up or down between 1850 and 1998 had
now been ‘adjusted’ to give a warming trend of 0.9 ◦ C per century. 82
And of course, all this only echoed on a much wider scale the similar findings re-
ported by McIntyre on Climate Audit in 2007, when he found that GISS had been play-
ing the same game with the US Historical Climatology Network data. By downgrad-
ing the original recorded figures for the US in the ‘dustbowl’ years of the 1930s and
increasing those for recent years, Hansen and Schmidt had been able to show 1998
replacing 1934 as the hottest year in American history. 83
So serious were the implications of all these discoveries, that it might have been
thought that they would provoke widespread concern, particularly when GISS and
NOAA were asked to explain the reason for these systematic ‘adjustments’ and no
convincing answer was forthcoming. But for those within the ‘consensus’ bubble, in-
cluding scientists, politicians and the media, it seemed it was best that these startling
revelations should simply be ignored. 84
As the Paris conference approached, no politician was keener for it to succeed
than the US president, Barack Obama. From the time of his first presidential cam-
paign in 2008, he had always shown himself to be a wholly committed supporter of
the ‘consensus’ on global warming. In his first important address after being elected,
he had promised that, after years of lagging behind, America would now ‘lead the
world’ in the fight against climate change. ‘The science’ he said, ‘is beyond dispute’.
‘Sea levels are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading
famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each hurricane season’.
Obama promised that he would introduce a tax on ‘carbon’ and a cap and trade
scheme, allowing businesses only to continue emitting carbon dioxide if they paid
for ‘carbon credits’ permitting them to do so. He would spend $15 billion on building
tens of thousands of new wind turbines, creating ‘five million new green jobs’. The
irony was that, at the very time he said all this, it was becoming clear that America
had launched on a spectacular energy revolution, thanks to fracking for oil and gas
buried in vast shale deposits. In just a few years, this would not only slash US gas
prices by more than a half, but also make America the world’s leading exporter of oil
69and gas.
America under Obama had thus been caught out facing both ways, with a Presi-
dent claiming that he wanted to follow Britain’s lead in aiming to cut carbon dioxide
emissions by 80 percent by 2050, while at the same time his country was benefiting
from an energy bonanza like nothing the world had ever seen, based on the very fossil
fuels he wanted to see eliminated.
When companies looked to repeat this astonishing success story, by fracking the
extensive shale reserves in Britain and parts of Europe, they ran into a concerted and
well-funded campaign of opposition, painting the technology as a complete envi-
ronmental disaster, polluting groundwater, setting off earthquakes and even causing
water from kitchen taps to catch fire. So influential was this largely unopposed cam-
paign that the public, certainly in Britain where the BBC in particular eagerly joined in,
was left almost wholly unaware that these claims were no more than almost wholly
fictitious propaganda. For a long time, it looked like yet another victory for organ-
ised groupthink. And even when, in 2016, the British government was at last to give
the go-ahead to a limited amount of tightly-regulated fracking, the initiative seemed
doomed in due course to run into Britain’s legal commitment to phase out virtually
all fossil fuels.
Despite Britain being given a possible chance to secure her energy future for gen-
erations to come, there seemed little prospect that she would enjoy anything like the
success of America, even though to its President this was an embarrassment he was
anxious never to mention. Similarly, nothing more was heard of his promised five
million new ‘green’ jobs.
18
Paris 2015: a final ‘triumph’ for groupthink
Today is a historic day in the fight to protect our planet for future generations. This
gives us the best possible shot to save the one planet we got.[sic]
President Obama 85
This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task
of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic
development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the
industrial revolution.
Christiana Figueres, chief UNFCCC organiser of the Paris conference, Brussels,
February 2015
One reason why those within the bubble had been so eager to proclaim 2014 as the
‘hottest year on record’ was their need to whip up expectations for the great Paris
climate conference in December 2015. The general aim was that, after the failure in
70Copenhagen to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the nations of the world must
this time really succeed in signing a legally binding treaty committing them all to a
massive reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and a wholesale shift away from
fossil fuels. Every stop had to be pulled out. For President Obama, due to step down
in 2017, it was to be his crowning ‘legacy’. Even the Pope was wheeled on, to sign
a papal encyclical calling for drastic action on reducing the use of fossil fuels for the
sake of the world’s poor. 86
The target was to prevent global temperatures from rising any more than 2 ◦ C
above where they had been, as the ‘consensus’ argued, before the industrial revo-
lution set the world on its catastrophic course (or, as others had it, the world began
naturally to warm again as it emerged from the Little Ice Age). And as the date for
them all to gather in Paris drew nearer, the clamour grew for even that 2 ◦ C target to
be lowered to just 1.5 ◦ C.
The general principle underlying the proposed treaty was that first put forward
by Maurice Strong at Rio in 1992 and again at Kyoto and Copenhagen. The nations
of the world would be divided into two categories. The first, the developed Western
countries, would all agree to making drastic emissions cuts, and they would also pay
$100 billion a year into a new ‘Green Climate Fund’, to assist those countries in the
second category, the rest of the world, in following suit by doing their best to curb
their own use of fossil fuels.
In the months before the conference, every country was asked by the UNFCCC to
submit what was called an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC). This
was to be its own ‘Climate Action Plan’, setting out in detail just how it proposed to
meet the aims of the proposed treaty in the years up to 2030. At first sight, almost all
of these opaquely written national submissions gave the desired impression, namely
that they were only too keen to co-operate with the ‘decarbonisation’ agenda. Those
from the ‘developing’ countries made much mention of their ‘renewables’ targets,
and their proposed efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, although they did
expect to be generously rewarded for this from the ‘Green Climate Fund’, funded by
the developed countries.
But when careful examination came to be given to each of the INDCs submitted
by the 20 countries that were the world’s heaviest emitters of carbon dioxide, respon-
sible between them for 81 percent of all global emissions, a very different picture
emerged. And it was one entirely missed by the world’s media. 87
Buried away in the figures submitted by China, now easily the world’s largest sin-
gle emitter, contributing 24 percent of the global total, it emerged that it was actually
planning by 2030 to double its carbon dioxide emissions, not least by building hun-
dreds more coal-fired power stations.
The INDC submitted by India, by now the world’s third largest emitter, showed
that it too was planning to build even more coal-fired power stations, which by 2030
71would contribute to a trebling of its annual emissions.
The fourth largest emitter, Russia, despite having slashed its emissions after 1990
by closing down many of the old Soviet industries, was now proposing to increase
them from their 2012 level by up to 38 percent. Japan, which was the fifth largest
emitter, claimed that it hoped to cut its emissions by some 15 percent, but was still
planning to build more coal-fired power plants.
Although South Korea, seventh on the emissions list, claimed that it would be cut-
ting emissions by 23 percent (not least by buying ‘carbon credits’ which would allow
them to ‘offset’ their continuing production of carbon dioxide), even its proposed tar-
get would still be 100 percent higher than it had been in 1990.
By the deadline, the Middle Eastern oil states, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the eighth
and ninth largest emitters, had not even submitted their proposals. But the United
Arab Emirates, which had more than doubled their emissions since 2002, gave no
indication of any plans to slow that increase, apart from a promise to invest in more
‘carbon free’ solar and nuclear power.
As for Brazil, the eleventh largest emitter, which had been rapidly increasing its
dependence on fossil fuels, it now offered as its main contribution that it would take
steps to slow down the clearing and burning of the Amazon rainforest.
But what about the countries most obviously missing from this list? President
Obama may have repeatedly talked the talk about his ambitious plans for the US,
as the world’s second largest emitter after China, but there was no more chance of
Congress agreeing to the proposed treaty than there had been in 1997 when the Sen-
ate unanimously voted ‘no’ to Kyoto. All of which left, as the only part of the world al-
ready committed to cutting its emissions by 40 percent by 2030, the European Union.
But even here, Poland was already refusing to sign the treaty, as it continued to build
more fossil-fuel power stations to keep its lights on. Germany, the world’s sixth largest
emitter, despite having built 26,000 wind turbines and pouring billions of euros into
solar power, was planning to do the same.
The only government in the world wholly committed to meeting that 40 percent
target by 2030 under its Climate Change Act was that of the UK, the 14th largest emit-
ter, by now responsible for only 1.3 percent of the global total. This was less than
China or India were each now adding every year, as Britain continued to shut down
those fossil-fuel power plants that in 2015 still provided two-thirds of its electricity.
As for the Green Climate Fund, which it was hoped would, by 2020, be handing
out $100 billion each year to help developing countries ‘adapt to climate change’, it
emerged, as the Paris conference approached, that firm pledges so far received from
the developed nations amounted to just $700 million. This left $99.3 billion still to be
found, just to pay for the fund’s first year. 88
At the start of December 40,000 politicians, officials, green activists, lobbyists and
journalists from 195 nations converged on a huge, specially-built venue outside Paris,
72appropriately at an airport largely reserved for private jets.
The outcome, as before, was entirely predictable. After two weeks of fractious
behind-the-scenes haggling, the weary-looking dignitaries assembled on the plat-
form of the main conference hall to put as brave a face on the result as they could,
as they congratulated each other on having reached a ‘historic agreement’. This was
what they and the media were to tell the world. But the truth was that almost the
only item on the agenda on which everyone had been persuaded to agree was that
each nation would submit a further statement of its progress and intentions every
five years. Despite every attempt made to pretend otherwise, there was no legally
binding treaty. As I wrote the following Sunday, below a picture of the Eiffel Tower
emblazoned with the huge illuminated slogan ‘1.5 ◦ C’:
No sooner last weekend were world leaders congratulating themselves on hav-
ing reached their ‘historic agreement’ to save the planet by scrapping all those
‘dirty’ fossil-fuels than two groups normally bitterly opposed to each other were
united in deriding the meaningless absurdity of what had happened.
The ultra-greens, led by the ‘father of the global warming scare’ James Hansen,
immediately hailed an agreement which committed no-one to anything as no
more than a ‘fake’ and a ‘fraud’. Clued-up climate sceptics equally recognised
that this much-vaunted ‘non-treaty’ was indeed – precisely as I predicted here
on November 1 – ‘the flop of the year’.
It really is time for us all to grasp just what a charade all that wishful thinking in
Paris turned out to be. Lost in their self-deluding groupthink, the 40,000 dele-
gates may have been happy to cheer the idea that we must abolish fossil fuels.
But not one pointed out that the world currently depends on fossil fuels to pro-
vide nearly 82 percent of all the energy it uses. Those useless ‘renewables’ they
want us all to use instead – based on the wind and the sun – supply less than 2
percent.
But equally buried from sight in Paris was the openly declared intention of China,
India and pretty well every ‘emerging economy’ in the world to build thousands
more coal-fired power stations, causing their ‘carbon emissions’ to double or
even treble. Global emissions in the next 15 years are set to soar, without any ef-
fect on the climate whatever. All of which leaves the countries of the West, which
fooled the media into thinking that anything at all had been achieved by that PR
stunt in Paris, in a ludicrously isolated position. And none more so than Britain.
now the only country in the world legally committed, by the Climate Change
Act, to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent within 35 years. 89
The pretence that Paris had resulted in a ‘legally binding treaty’ was to continue for
months to come, faithfully reported by the media, with little sign of any attempt to
look at the facts of what had really happened.
The one thing which more than any was temporarily to save the face of the ‘con-
sensus’ cause over the following year was the unpredicted arrival of a record-breaking
73El Niño, which by 2016 had pushed global temperatures so high that even the two
satellite records reported that 2016 tied for warmth with 1998.
Although this was a natural event, the temperature spike in 2015 and 2016 had
equally naturally been greeted as proof that at last the embarrassing ‘pause’ had
ended, and that the rise in man-made global warming was back on track. But even
before 2016 was over, the satellites were again showing a dramatic collapse in tem-
peratures. By the end of 2016 it was no longer standing out as ‘the hottest year ever’
and by the middle of 2017 the fall in temperatures had amounted to more than 0.6 ◦ C.
Once again, those predictions by groupthink-inspired computer models that temper-
atures would rise through the 21st century by an average of 0.3 ◦ C or more per decade
had been proved wrong. The ‘pause’ was back.
At this point we can break off from this chronological summary of the global warm-
ing story, the purpose of which has been to show how at every stage this had been
governed by the three defining rules of groupthink.
Naturally this has left out countless other relevant examples. But this paper would
not be complete without reference to one more example, the consequences and im-
plications of which are so immense that it can be properly regarded as ‘the other half’
of the entire story. I discuss this in two parts: firstly the general picture and then the
specific and in some ways unique example of the United Kingdom.
19
The real global warming disaster: how
groupthink shaped the political response
Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st
century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged
temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross
exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into
implausible of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial
age.
Dr Richard Lindzen
By far the most extraordinary achievement of the panic over ‘man-made global warm-
ing’ was the way it managed to demonise carbon dioxide, a trace gas vital to all life on
74earth, as a dangerous ‘pollutant’. Equally demonised, therefore, were those sources
of energy based on fossil fuels, coal, gas and oil, on which all modern industrial civili-
sation had been built. Wherever possible, according to the groupthink, these had to
be described as ‘dirty’ (as opposed to the ‘clean’ energy from renewables), and had to
be phased out or eliminated from human activity.
As I suggested in the title of my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, ‘man-
made climate change’ was indeed heading the world towards a catastrophe. But this
was not the one conjured up by the ‘true believers’: soaring temperatures, vanish-
ing ice caps, flooded cities, ‘extreme weather’, ‘climate chaos’, ‘mass-extinctions’, even
a threat to the survival of life on earth. None of this was happening in the way they
liked to claim. The real disaster now threatening lay in the measures being adopted in
consequence of that panic, based on the belief that the only way to ‘save the planet’
was to ‘decarbonise’ the world’s economies. And this was to be done by the whole-
sale abandonment of those ‘polluting’ fossil fuels, which by 2014, according to the
International Energy Agency, were still supplying more than four-fifths of all the en-
ergy the world was using. 90 Instead, of course, the groupthink dictated that we must
move as fast as possible to relying on those sources of energy which supposedly did
not emit carbon dioxide. This would amount to a complete revolution in how the en-
ergy to power the global economy was produced. The line was that in future it should
be centred on ‘renewables’ and on a massive expansion of nuclear power.
Indeed, scores of nations were now moving to adopt such a policy, most notably
the US under President Obama and the countries of the European Union, but this
drive to ‘decarbonise’ brought with it two massive problems, which those promoting
it invariably did all they could to hide, deny or obfuscate by playing implausible tricks
with the figures.
One was simply the cost. Nowhere in the world had it proved possible to switch to
‘zero carbon’ energy sources without the aid of colossal subsidies. The actual cost of
‘renewable’ and even nuclear power was up to four or even more times higher than
that derived from coal.
The second huge problem was that the two ‘renewable’ technologies that had at-
tracted most attention, wind and solar, were so unreliable because of the inescapable
fact that they were wholly dependent on the vagaries of the weather. There was noth-
ing their advocates were more reluctant to admit than that wind turbines and solar
panels could only produce electricity irregularly, unpredictably and therefore at only
a fraction of their potential capacity. In the case of wind turbines this averaged out at
a third or less of their optimum power; for solar panels, except in parts of the world
where the sun could be relied on to shine most of the time, it averaged out, as in
northern Europe, at only around 10 percent. 91
But the more of these wind and solar farms that got built, the more the constant
fluctuation of their output created serious technical problems for electricity grids. To
75keep supply and demand in balance, they needed instantly available back-up. And
this could not be provided by coal or nuclear power, which were designed to generate
‘baseload’ electricity, and could not suddenly increase their output to meet a sharp
rise in demand,
The only energy source flexible enough to provide that instantly available back-
up when needed was natural gas, which unlike the others could be quickly ramped
up and down. In other words, the only way to keep a grid balanced was by means of
one of those ‘polluting’ fossil-fuels the groupthinkers wished to see the back of.
The astonishing fact was that, by 2015, despite more than $1 trillion having been
poured into building hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and solar farms across
the world, the amount of the world’s energy needs they supplied was still almost in-
finitesimally small. In 2014, according to the IEA’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, wind
contributed only 0.46 percent of total global energy; solar and tidal power just 0.35
percent. These thus amounted between them to less than 1 percent. 92 Yet so carried
away by make-believe were politicians and the media that hardly anywhere outside
technical reports were these figures reported.
And despite the lip-service that so many countries were now paying to the need
for more ‘renewables’, those national submissions by every country before the Paris
conference showed that most of the ‘developing’ countries were still between them
planning to build huge numbers of coal-fired power stations to keep their economies
growing. From their own figures, it was possible to calculate that this would result by
2030 in a rise of 46 percent in carbon dioxide emissions in just 15 years.
20
The peculiar case of the United Kingdom
We will continue to take a lead in global action against climate change, as the
government demonstrated by ratifying the Paris Agreement. We were the first
country to introduce a Climate Change Act.
Conservative Party election manifesto, 2017
In no country in the world were the contradictions of this make-believe policy more
evident than in Britain, the only nation committed by law to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions by more than 80 percent. 93 Thus was the government planning to phase
out almost all use of the fossil-fuels which, in 2015, were still providing 82 percent
of all the country’s energy. There was no better illustration of the illusory world this
had carried the politicians into than a document first published by the Department
for Energy and Climate Change in 2011, entitled 2050 Pathways. After 2030, for in-
76stance, almost wholly unnoticed by the media, this envisaged an end to all use of gas
for cooking and heating, on which 90 percent of households relied, to be replaced
instead by electricity. The transport system would likewise come to be largely reliant
on electricity, including, by 2030, 60 percent of all cars.
All this and more, DECC proposed, would require a doubling of Britain’s electricity
supply, to be provided almost entirely by a massive expansion of ‘renewables’, such
as offshore windfarms, and a new fleet of nuclear reactors. New fossil-fuel power sta-
tions might still be permitted, but only on condition that they were fitted with ‘carbon
capture and storage’, to pipe away their carbon dioxide emissions into holes under the
North Sea (using a technology not even yet developed).
If this seemed to be pure Alice in Wonderland fantasy (on the lines of the White
Queen recalling how she managed to ‘believe as many as six impossible things before
breakfast’), by 2017 it could be measured against the reality of what had happened to
all the bewildering array of ‘green’ schemes the government had already put its hand
to.
Making national headlines in March 2017 was ‘Diesel-gate’, reporting that particu-
lates emitted from diesel-powered vehicles were now such a problem that they were
allegedly causing anything between 12,000 and 40,000 premature deaths a year. But
the wholesale switch to diesel, which had now put 14 million such vehicles on Britain’s
roads, had been engineered through the tax system, on the advice in 2001 of Sir David
King, when he was the government’s chief scientific adviser, after he was told that
diesel emitted a smaller amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide than petrol.
In Northern Ireland in January 2017, the coalition government collapsed, creating
its worst political crisis since the end of the Troubles. This came about through a ma-
jor scandal over a government ‘green’ scheme, the Renewable Heat Incentive, under
which businesses had been offered almost unlimited subsidies to heat their premises
with wood chip boilers. So many had rushed to claim £160 in subsidy for every £100
they paid for wood chips that they were running their boilers round the clock, even
to heat factories, offices and warehouses no longer in use. The total subsidy bill, it
had now been estimated, would by 2020 have soared to £1 billion.
A similar, little-noticed racket was already going on in England, where, under the
same scheme, owners of large houses openly boasted to friends that they were able
to keep their wood-chip heating systems going full-blast even at the height of sum-
mer, because they were making a 60 percent profit on all the fuel they burned (which
contributed to the fact that Britain was now said to be burning more wood than at
any time since the Napoleonic wars).
Another example, which did hit the headlines in March 2017, was Drax in York-
shire, once the largest, cleanest, most efficient coal-fired power station in Europe.
Under a different ‘green’ subsidy scheme, it was now converting its boilers to burn-
ing ‘biomass’: millions of tons of wood pellets a year, shipped 3800 miles across the
77Atlantic from the forests of North Carolina.
It paid Drax to do this because a swingeing government ‘carbon tax’ had delib-
erately made it increasingly unprofitable to burn coal. On the other hand, for burn-
ing wood (officially rated by the EU as ‘carbon neutral’, because eventually new trees
would supposedly absorb the carbon dioxide emitted by burning the wood pellets),
Drax was now receiving a subsidy of £500 million a year. But a report from Chatham
House had confirmed that Drax was now emitting more carbon dioxide per unit of
electricity than it did when only burning coal.
Another scandal just coming to light was the way developers were now receiving
more than £200 million a year in subsidies, again under the Renewable Heat Incen-
tive, for erecting large industrial ‘anaerobic digesters’ in the countryside, to turn huge
quantities of farm crops into methane for the national gas grid. No less than 131,000
acres of maize alone were now being grown for this purpose, on land formerly used to
produce food. But this was now arousing serious environmental concern over spills
of highly toxic ammonia used in the process, which had killed livestock and fish in
fields and rivers.
At least the government was still havering over a £40 billion project, formerly
supported by prime minister David Cameron, to build six gigantic tidal power sta-
tion round Britain’s coasts. For such a colossal outlay, these would only produce rel-
atively small amounts of some of the most expensive electricity in the world, while
they would also, conservationists warned, cause serious environmental damage to
wading birds, fish including migratory eels, and other wildlife.
But by far the greatest environmental damage, at the greatest cost to electricity
users, had been done through the £100 billion spent on covering vast areas of Britain’s
land and sea with 7500-plus wind turbines and solar farms. These were already cost-
ing £4.6 billion a year in subsidies, and the bill was now rising so fast that by 2022,
according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), they would add up to a fur-
ther £31 billion. 94
Even though by now these ‘renewables’ were producing 14 percent of Britain’s
electricity, the actual output was so unpredictable that, if it hadn’t been for the re-
maining carbon dioxide-emitting gas-fired power stations ready to step in when the
wind wasn’t blowing, Britain might already have been experiencing major power cuts.
But the biggest headlines of all, in July 2017, were reserved for the government’s
announcement that, from 2040 onwards, it would become illegal in Britain to make,
import or sell any cars powered by petrol or diesel. All new cars from that date on
would have to be all-electric. Successive governments had been pushing motorists
to switch to electric cars for several years, allocating £400 million of taxpayers’ money
in subsidies to bribe them to do so. Despite this, there were many practical reasons
why these had not caught on, and they so far comprised only 0.3 percent of the 31.7
million cars on Britain’s roads.
78But the most crucial question raised by this plan to ban any but all-electric cars
by 2040 was where was all the extra electricity needed to power them to come from?
This, it was estimated, could be as much as 30 gigawatts (GW). This alone would add
nearly 50 percent to Britain’s current peak electricity demand of 61 GW, more than
half of it still supplied by the fossil fuels the Government wished to see eliminated.
The government’s answer was that it would come from wind and nuclear power.
But to produce another 30 GW from wind turbines alone would require an additional
100 GW of capacity, bringing the number of new turbines needed to 30–40,000, five
times more than the 7,600 already installed. And, on windless or near-windless days
and nights, these would not charge the batteries of many electric cars.
As for nuclear, to produce 30 GW would require some nine more new nuclear
power stations the size of the only one the government had already committed it-
self to, planned at Hinkley Point, at a capital cost of £24 billion (with a lifetime cost
including subsidies of £50 billion). But this itself was unlikely to be completed (if it
ever is) before 2030, and no more were yet firmly in the pipeline.
Even before this latest scheme had to be factored in, the costs of the government’s
existing ‘decarbonisation’ policy were soaring to astronomic levels. Projections by
the OBR in March 2017 showed that by 2022 the annual cost of all ‘green’ taxes and
subsides was due to rise from £8.97 billion a year to £15.2 billion. This would by 2022
bring the five-year total to £73 billion, a figure far higher than the estimated cost of
the projected HS2 rail scheme, which is the most expensive engineering project ever
seen in Britain. The cost equated by 2022 to £584 a year for every household in the
land.
Not for nothing had prime minister Theresa May’s then-joint-chief of staff, Nick
Timothy, described the Climate Change Act in April 2016 as ‘a unilateral and mon-
strous act of national self-harm’. But at the 2017 general election the Conservative
Party manifesto made no fewer than three mentions of how Britain was now ‘leading
the world in taking action against climate change’. It even made that boast, quoted
above, that Britain had been the first country in the world ‘to introduce a Climate
Change Act’.
No other country, of course, had followed the British example. China and India
alone were each adding more new carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year than
Britain’s entire annual emissions, which now amounted to only 1.1 percent of the
global total.
79In this respect, those running Britain – not to mention pretty well all those who
held sway over public opinion, such as the media – were still so blinded by the all-
prevailing groupthink that it could not allow any chink of reality to break in.
21
President Trump finally calls the groupthink’s
bluff
Under the agreement, China will be able to increase these emissions for a
staggering number of years. . . Not us.. . . China will be allowed to build hundreds of
additional coal plants. . . we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this
agreement. . . India can double their coal production. We’re supposed to get rid of
ours. In short. . . this agreement is less about the climate and more about other
countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States. The rest of the
world applauded when we signed the Paris agreement – they went wild; they were
so happy – for the simple reason that it put our country. . . at a very, very big
economic disadvantage.
President Trump, 1 June 2017
Rest of world rallies around Paris deal.
BBC News website, 2 June 2017
President Trump can turn his back on the world, but the world cannot ignore the
very real threat of climate change. This decision is an immoral assault on the public
health, safety and security of everyone on this planet.
Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York, 1 June 2017
There could have been no more appropriate event on which to end this narrative
than the near-universal howl of disbelief and rage that greeted President Trump’s
announcement in the Rose Garden of the White House on 1 June 2017 that he was
pulling the US out of the Paris ‘climate accord’. World leaders and other senior politi-
cians immediately joined with much of the media in expressing utter shock and dis-
may at what the Democrat leader in the Senate called ‘one of the worst policy moves
made in the 21st century’. Trump had scarcely finished speaking before the BBC had
wheeled on someone to describe his decision as ‘apocalyptic, paranoid and delu-
sional’. Social media went into near-meltdown, with screaming abuse and messages
of which one of the mildest was ‘climate deniers are in for a very rude awakening
when u can no longer breathe clean air, and your kids are sick from pollution’.
But the most remarkable feature of Trump’s speech, which they all missed, was
how he stripped away the spin and misrepresentation which back in December 2015
had led even that celebrated climate zealot James Hansen to scorn the Paris Agree-
ment as no more than a ‘fake’ and a ‘fraud’. Trump pointed out that, contrary to all the
80attempts made to pretend otherwise, Paris was not a ‘legally binding treaty’. But even
more important, he was also the first politician to expose what had been the real dirty
secret of Paris, buried away in those INDCs, setting out how, by 2030, each country in-
tended to respond to the proposed ‘climate goals’. Herein lay the central fraud of the
entire agreement. The ‘developing’ countries, led by China and India, certainly had
their eye on that proposed Green Climate Fund, whereby the developed countries
would supposedly pay them $100 billion every year to assist them to ‘decarbonise’,
above all by going for ‘renewables’. The developing countries had all thus paid lip-
service up-front to what was required, and how they planned to expand their ‘renew-
able’ energy sources: wind, solar and the rest. But hidden in the small print, as Trump
highlighted, was the real story. China and India, as the first and third largest carbon
dioxide emitting countries in the world, were each planning to build hundreds of new
coal-fired power stations, which alone would by 2030 double and treble their emis-
sions. Analysis of the INDCs showed that almost every one of the larger developing
nations planned something not dissimilar. As for that Green Climate Fund, as Trump
went on to explain, it was also just make-believe. By now, only $1 billion had been
pledged, of which almost all, thanks to Obama, had been offered by the US.
Trump’s speech may have been justifiably America-centric, in talking of how the
US had been committed by Obama to paying by far the highest economic price in
terms of money and lost jobs, for a deal whereby China, India and the rest would
take America’s money but carry on emitting carbon dioxide just as before. This was
why the President was entirely justified in pulling the US out of a non-binding deal
as fraudulent as any major international agreement can ever have been. But just as
significant was that none of those now accusing him of ‘betraying the future of the
planet’ appeared to be even remotely aware of any of the facts he had been address-
ing. So lost were they in their bubble that their only response was either just to resort
to hysterical abuse or, by some, to claim that Trump’s decision would make little dif-
ference to the battle to save the planet. This was because the EU and everyone else
would be united in complying with the ‘Accord’, while China would now ‘take the lead’
in renewables and the great ‘low carbon’ revolution.
All this was as perfect an example of the power of groupthink as could be imag-
ined. President Trump, like no politician before him, had finally called the bluff of the
make-believe. But so firmly cocooned from reality were the politicians and the media
that none of them had even begun to realise it.
8122
Conclusions: what happens when the groupthink
does meet reality?
The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognisable: it is
the moment when its value is called in question. Every general belief being no
more than a fiction, it can only survive on the condition that it be not subjected to
examination.
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd
The conclusions of this paper are divided into three parts. The first gives a general
retrospective overview on what was the fatal flaw in the groupthink that drove the
global warming scare. The second summarises some of the more obvious reasons
why the groupthink has become so powerfully entrenched that it might be hard to
imagine how its grip could be broken. But the third suggests that in practice this
is already happening. Recent events have confirmed that the supposed worldwide
political ‘consensus’ that man-made global warming poses an unprecedented threat
to the future of the planet has never been a true consensus at all. And this has finally
begun to change the entire story.
Groupthink’s fatal flaw
‘Nullius in verba’: The motto of the Royal Society
Future generations may look back on the late-20th and early 21st-century panic over
man-made warming as one of the strangest episodes in the history of either science
or politics. But they will only be able to understand how such an extraordinary flight
from reality could have taken place by reference to the peculiarities of collective hu-
man psychology, and in particular to the rules defining the nature of groupthink. Of
course, the world had seen such triumphs of groupthink before, as in the history of its
great religions or the way the belief-system based on Marxism held sway across such
a vast area of the world through much of the 20th century.
In crucial respects the ideology of global warming has much in common with
these examples. Like them, it originated with only a very small group of people, who
had become gripped by a visionary idea. Like them, it was based on predictions of
a hypothetical future – or prophecies – which could not be definitively proved right
or wrong. Like them it therefore became important to insist that this belief-system
must be subscribed to by a ‘consensus’ of all right-thinking people, and using every
kind of social, political and psychological pressure to enforce conformity with it. And
like them this inevitably shaped the response to anyone who would not be a part of
it, who therefore had to be condemned as a ‘heretic’, a ‘subversive’ or a ‘denier’, and
whose dissent had to be more or less ruthlessly suppressed.
82What made this latest example different from the others, however, was that it was
based on the unrivalled authority accorded in the modern world to science. 95 And
herein lay what would eventually prove to be its fatal weakness. Unlike those other
belief-systems, it could ultimately be tested against empirically verifiable facts. It cru-
cially rested on those all-important computer model predictions which, as the years
went by, could increasingly be compared with the objective evidence of what was
actually happening.
For its first 10 years or so, as we know, the theory that the world was warming
as a direct result of the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide still seemed plausible. But
increasingly after 1998 the predictions and the real-world evidence began to diverge.
And the response of those within the groupthink was not, as the principles of proper
science should have dictated, to ask whether the theory itself might therefore be in
some way flawed.
Some scientists from within the ‘consensus’ did indeed try to come up with mod-
ifications to the theory that might explain why the predictions were no longer being
confirmed by the evidence. Around 2007, with a startling drop in global tempera-
tures, they for the first time began to wonder whether ‘natural factors’, such as shifts
in the world’s major ocean currents might not be having more influence on shaping
the climate than the IPCC’s computer models had allowed for. 96 Eventually even the
IPCC and the UK Met Office acknowledged that there had been a temperature ‘pause’
in the years after 1998. But they too tried to explain this away by suggesting that
these natural factors were merely ‘masking the underlying warming trend’, which in
due course would re-emerge. Or they suggested that the heat created by man-made
warming was only no longer visible because it was ‘hiding in the oceans’.
This claim was supported by the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, which
accepted that ‘93 percent’ of the extra heat entering the world during the pause had
been absorbed by the oceans, with only 1 percent of it raising temperatures at the
earth’s land surface. 97 Other scientists simply ignored the growing evidence that
the models had got it wrong, or worse still started to manipulate the evidence, as
in all that wholesale ‘adjustment’ of the surface temperature records, to show that
the world was indeed still warming as the theory had predicted. Indeed, nothing
should have aroused clearer suspicion that something was fundamentally question-
able about the theory than the repeated attempts by those within the ‘consensus’ to
manipulate the scientific data to support their case. The supreme example of this, of
course, had been all those tortuous efforts to ‘get rid of the Medieval Warm Period’
and show that the world was now hotter than at any time in history.
What is also highly relevant to our understanding of how this all came about, how-
ever, was the remarkable readiness, not just of the scientific community itself, but also
of politicians, the media and so many others, to accept the man-made warming thesis
without ever questioning it.
83At the beginning of this paper, in a section headed ‘the power of second-hand
thinking’, we looked at the obvious way in which the vast majority of people who went
along with the ‘consensus’ only did so because they had never given it any serious
study or examined the evidence themselves. They had simply taken their opinions
from what they had been told by others. In this sense, acceptance of the ‘consensus’
mindset was like a contagious condition. Any attempt to question those who had
passed under its spell as to why they believed what they did all too often revealed that
they didn’t really know anything about it at all. Their heads were filled with a ragbag
of mantras and gobbets of misinformation (such as that the vanishing of Arctic ice
was threatening the survival of polar bears), which were so often demonstrably the
very reverse of the truth.
And this was not just true of many members of the general public. It was equally
true of people paid or qualified to know better, such as environmental journalists,
politicians, indeed a great many scientists themselves. A neighbour of mine was a
reputable professor of chemistry at a leading university and, when he spoke about
global warming, he liked to claim that he did so with the authority of ‘a scientist’. But
he would then solemnly tell us that the rise in sea levels caused by climate change
would eventually submerge our village, even though it was several hundred feet up
on the hills of Somerset.
It is this blur of firmly convinced ignorance that reveals one of the more conspic-
uous characteristics of the ‘true believers’: that it is impossible for those outside the
‘consensus’ ever to have any serious dialogue with them. Those possessed by group-
think were convinced that they just ‘knew’ what it was they thought they knew. They
were used to talking about it only to those who shared the same beliefs. They were
incapable of focussing properly on any evidence that might seem to contradict their
certainties.
It was this which too often brought into play Janis’s third rule: the only response
to those who disagreed with them was, first, incredulity that anyone could be so silly,
and then to resort to the kind of scornful abuse they considered to be the only appro-
priate way to deal with these ‘deniers’, who could just be caricatured as no better than
‘flat earthers’, conspiracy theorists who could be contemptuously dismissed because
they were ‘anti-science’.
In reality, of course, it was the sceptics themselves, such as Richard Lindzen and
Paul Reiter, who were trying to defend proper science. They also eventually included,
for instance, such eminent figures in the world scientific community as the two vet-
eran Princeton physicists, Freeman Dyson and Will Happer. It was the supporters of
the ‘consensus’, as they could see, who had tragically betrayed the principles of proper
science.
But this was equally true of those grand figures at the very top of the ‘consensus’
hierarchy. As we have seen, it was precisely this same attitude that was displayed by
84the senior scientists responsible for the Climategate emails; or by such prestigious
figures as the ‘chief scientist’ Sir David King, or those presidents of the Royal Society,
Lord May and Sir Paul Nurse. How ironic, it was observed (not least by many dissenting
members of the Royal Society itself ), that the defining motto of the oldest and long
most respected scientific society in the world had since the 1660s, been ‘nullius in
verba’, commonly translated as ‘take nobody’s word for it’. As countless distinguished
members of that august society had known since the days of Robert Hooke, Robert
Boyle and Isaac Newton, there is no principle of scientific method more fundamental
than this. No new scientific proposition should be accepted as true solely ‘on the word
of others’, unless they can demonstrate that it is properly supported by evidence. To
test any hypothesis, one must look at all the evidence, making sure that any which
might invalidate the theory has also been fully taken into account.
All this was what the ‘carbon dioxide equals global warming’ theory had turned on
its head. Almost the entire Western scientific community had been so carried away by
the simplicity of the theory that they never subjected it to proper three-dimensional
scientific questioning. They programmed their computer models accordingly. And
the only response considered necessary to an argument suggesting that the theory
might in some way be flawed was just to ignore or ridicule it.
Even when ever more evidence began to suggest that the theory was not being
borne out as predicted, the response was either to find ways to modify the theory
round the edges, so that it could still be held onto intact, or simply to invent new
‘facts’ to make the theory still seem plausible. Thus, right from the start, the entire
house of cards had been based on ‘taking other people’s word for it’, without ever
putting the hypothesis to the test or allowing any genuine scientific debate. Again
and again, however hard they tried to torture the evidence into seeming to support
their theory, those hard facts kept on intruding to suggest otherwise.
That is why, one day, future generations will eventually look back at this story in
disbelieving astonishment: to ask ‘how on earth could such a thing have happened?’.
Before we move on to the second of our conclusions, it is not inappropriate to quote
those words attributed to Isaac Newton:
I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting my-
self in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
…and then to add a word on the relevance to the ‘consensus’ on global warming of
that seminal book by Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
85Kuhn’s thesis was that the history of science has been characterised by the preva-
lence of ruling ‘paradigms’, which provide an overall consensus in some area of sci-
ence within which the vast majority of scientists continue to think and work so long
as their particular paradigm continues to be generally accepted. One of the most
famous examples discussed by Kuhn was the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic geocentric cos-
mology, which had held sway for more than 1500 years. This paradigm only finally
began to give way when Copernicus developed his new cosmological model, finally
published just before his death in 1543, placing the Sun at the centre of the solar
system. But even then, it took a long time for the Copernican model to win full ac-
ceptance, because the hold of the old geocentric paradigm continued to remain so
powerful (as Galileo found to his cost nearly a century later).
Another familiar example of a rather speedier paradigm shift, not mentioned by
Kuhn, was that which followed Louis Pasteur’s challenge to the ruling orthodoxy that
one of the major causes of diseases was their ‘spontaneous generation’ in ‘foul air’
(the so-called ‘miasma’ theory). Pasteur was able to show that the real cause of these
diseases, and much else, was the presence in the air of the micro-organisms later more
specifically differentiated as bacteria and viruses. But even Pasteur initially ran into
bitter opposition from those locked into the existing paradigm, because it was on
this that all their thinking, careers and reputations relied. They could not think outside
their familiar bubble.
We are confronted today with a similar problem over the consensus on global
warming, which has established itself as the ruling paradigm of our time, centred on
that simple equation between greenhouse gases and temperatures.
Kuhn showed how, long before a paradigm finally comes to be superseded, awk-
ward ‘anomalies’ often come to light, which those within it try to explain without
abandoning their belief in the established consensus. This, of course, is what has
happened with the ‘rising carbon dioxide equals rising temperatures’ orthodoxy. All
sorts of anomalies have arisen, from the failure of the computer models to predict
observed evidence, to all those natural factors influencing climate that the paradigm
is too crude to take proper account: shifts in the major ocean currents, solar radia-
tion, and the implausibility of the needed positive feedback effect of water vapour,
without which large warming is impossible.
As Kuhn observed, a real paradigm shift can only take place when a new theory
emerges which accounts for all the evidence more plausibly than that which it has
replaced. And the trouble with the over-simple global warming theory is that, despite
enough anomalies having arisen to suggest that it is wholly inadequate to explain all
the evidence, no new theory has yet emerged comprehensive enough to replace it.
And the reason for this is frustratingly simple. We have now learned enough to
know that what really shapes the climate is far more complex than any one theoretical
framework can yet hope to accommodate. We have many new pieces of the jigsaw
86but not yet the complete picture they represent.
We have indeed begun to recognise that natural factors , for example the El Niño–
Southern Oscillation, have much more influence on fluctuations in global tempera-
tures than the paradigm allowed for. Something of the interactions of climate with
solar radiation has been known about ever since the connection was first observed
by William Herschel in 1801, and much important new work has been done on the
subject in the past 30 years. But no-one has yet begun to produce a comprehensive
explanation for the fluctuations in global temperatures since the Earth emerged from
the last ice age (let alone what we know about those even more dramatic fluctuations
stretching back through geological time before that).
What caused the rise in temperatures that produced the Medieval Warm Period?
Or the fall in temperatures that led to the centuries-long Little Ice Age which fol-
lowed? What then accounted for the return to rising temperatures which has marked
the two centuries of the modern warming, of which the modest further temperature
rise of the past 30 years can be seen as just part of a continuum?
The truth is that we simply do not have proper explanations for any of these nat-
ural events. The more we learn about all the different factors which undoubtedly
play their part in shaping the world’s climate, the more we have to accept that it still
presents us with too many ‘unknowns’, both known and unknown.
But, unlike Newton, the last thing too many scientists can afford to admit is how
much they don’t really know. Much safer to stay within the bubble, which seems to
provide an easy explanation, and to ignore or ridicule anyone suggesting that there
might be ‘more things in heaven and earth’ than are dreamed of in their paradigm.
So where does this leave the world?: When or how will reality
finally break in?
If there is an insignificant increase in the temperature, it is not due to
anthropogenic factors but to natural factors related to the planet itself and to solar
activity. There is no evidence confirming a positive linkage between the level of
carbon dioxide and temperature changes. . . when we see the biggest international
adventure based on totalitarian ideology. . . which tries to defend itself using
disinformation and falsified facts, it is hard to think of any other word to describe
this but ‘war’.
Alexander Ilarionov, Moscow 2004 98
The question observers familiar with this story have long been asking is this: when
and how will reality at last begin to break in? What are the possible factors which
might finally begin to dispel such a fog of delusion?
87The real problem, of course, is that, above all in the Western world, the group-
think paradigm has become so all-pervasive that in 2017 it is still hard to imagine
how its grip can eventually be broken. And the greatest obstacle to this is the extent
to which so many different players in the drama have become academically, finan-
cially and ideologically dependent on it. For a start there is the spell it has come to
exercise over almost the entire Western scientific establishment, including virtually
all its leading scientific institutions, scientific journals and universities. With so many
careers and reputations now wholly identified with the ‘consensus’, it is almost im-
possible to imagine how so many of those involved could ever change their minds.
They are part of what has become known as ‘the climate industry’, not least the army
of academics whose research funding depends on their unquestioning adherence to
the official line.
Another key part of the climate industry are those ‘environmental’ lobby groups,
such as WWF or Friends of the Earth, which have themselves become a significant
part of the international climate establishment. Even now, it has still not been gener-
ally appreciated how many of these organisations receive huge sums in government
funding, not just to campaign openly for the cause but also, less conspicuously, to
act as pressure groups on those same governments, urging them to adopt ever more
drastic measures to promote ‘clean, green’ energy and to eliminate ‘dirty’ fossil fuels.
In terms of a vested financial interest, even this pales into insignificance compared
to the colossal subsidy bonanza available for all those ‘green’ energy schemes them-
selves: the hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and millions of solar panels across
the world, the power stations which have switched from coal to burning ‘biomass’, the
millions of acres of farmland switched from food to energy crops and the vast areas
of rainforests cleared for ‘environmentally friendly’ biofuels, the latter an immense
ecological disaster.
Numerous other financial interests stand firmly in the way of any backtracking on
the rush to ‘decarbonise’, but one more must be mentioned, not just because it is so
lucrative, but because it is so nakedly cynical. There is no part of the climate industry
future generations may find more bizarre than the system known as ‘carbon trading’,
originally devised under the auspices of Maurice Strong at the time of the Rio summit.
99
As has been observed, this is the modern equivalent of the late-medieval sale of ‘in-
dulgences’, whereby the Papacy, in return for money, granted the gullible absolution
from their sins. These days we find it hard to believe that such a delusional practice
could ever have been got away with. But our own version is the system whereby,
under the auspices of the UNFCCC, it has been possible to make billions from selling
the right to continue emitting carbon dioxide to businesses and other organisations
which, in return for buying ‘carbon credits’ or ‘carbon offsets’, can then carry on ‘sin-
ning’ just as before.
With all its myriad beneficiaries, the climate industry has now swollen to such a
88size that, according to one study, it could now be worth worldwide as much as $1.5
trillion a year. This is greater than the entire annual GDP of all but a handful of coun-
tries. 100 And even this does not include all those countless other individuals and or-
ganisations which have become so carried away by the ‘consensus’ narrative that they
have just unthinkingly gone along with it. 101 This is often the case even when an
organisation has no possible connection with climate issues, financial or otherwise,
as we saw from the way the director-general of the National Trust, one of Britain’s
most successful and respected charities, announced in 2015 that ‘climate change’ was
now ‘the greatest challenge’ the Trust was facing. Dame Helen Ghosh, who had been
the top civil servant at the Department of the Environment at the time when it was
drafting the Climate Change Act, explained that the rising sea levels caused by global
warming were eroding Britain’s coastline, much of it owned by the Trust, by causing
it to ‘fall into the sea’.
Strangely, for a woman whose proper concerns were so wrapped up with preserv-
ing the nation’s historic heritage, she seemed to know so little of history that she was
unaware that Britain’s east coast has been continually retreating and ‘falling into the
sea’ for 6000 years, ever since rising sea levels and sinking land first made Britain an
island. This added the Trust to all that army of other interest groups that have come
to stand as a mighty deadweight against any rational attempt to reverse the momen-
tum of the belief in man-made global warming, with all its horrendous political con-
sequences.
But the groupthink driving both that belief itself and the political response to it
has always essentially been centred on those countries of the Western world, which
not only originated the panic over global in the first place, but have remained its main
drivers ever since. Indeed, it is precisely this fact which is now turning out to be the
crux of the whole story.
The West versus the rest, but without the USA
We take note of the decision of the United States of America to withdraw from the
Paris Agreement. . . The Leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris
Agreement is irreversible. We reiterate the importance of fulfilling the UNFCCC
commitment by developed countries in providing means of implementation
including financial resources to assist developing countries. . . We reaffirm our
strong commitment to the Paris Agreement, moving swiftly towards its full
implementation.
Communiqué issued after G20 meeting, Hamburg, 8 July 2017
In terms of how this mighty drama will continue to unfold, by far its most significant
feature is that long-familiar divide between the ‘developed’ countries and the rest of
89the world, where the power of Western groupthink has always in reality exercised very
much less sway. One of the central ironies of the scare over global warming is the ex-
tent to which it became ultimately undermined by precisely that core principle that
had been placed at the heart of the world’s response to it by Maurice Strong, when
he set up the Rio summit in 1992. This was the division of the world into two distinct
groups: the Annex I nations of the West, expected to take the lead in drastically cut-
ting their emissions, and the ‘developing’ countries across the rest of the world, which
could be largely exempted from such restrictions until their economies had caught
up with those of the West.
It was the blatantly one-sided nature of this deal which had twice-over prevented
any agreement on a meaningful global ‘climate treaty’, in Kyoto and Copenhagen.
While the Western countries embarked on ever more costly and economically dam-
aging attempts to reduce their emissions, the economies of the ‘developing’ countries
continued to grow, to the point where China and India had become the world’s first
and third largest emitters of carbon dioxide.
Then in 2015 came Paris. And if ever there was a moment when reality should
finally have broken in on the West’s wishful thinking, it was the publication of all those
INDCs, whereby the developing nations set out how they intended to shape their
energy policy for the next 15 years.
One after another, they explained how they planned to respond to what the West-
ern world was asking for. China was intending by 2030 to raise its carbon dioxide
emissions by 100 percent. India by 200 percent. Almost all the other ‘developing’
nations in the list of the world’s top 20 emitters, along with Russia and Japan, were
equally forecasting significant increases. So the overall picture that emerged was that,
while the US (still under Obama) and the EU were proposing by 2030 to reduce their
annual carbon dioxide emissions by 1.7 billion tonnes, India was planning to increase
its emissions by 4.9 billion tonnes and China by 10.9 billion tonnes. It was certainly
some deal.
The INDCs thus showed that total predicted global emissions within only 15 years
would be nearly 50 percent higher than they had been in 2013. 102 This should cer-
tainly have been seen as a historically significant moment, in at least two ways. The
first, obviously, was that it showed what the rest of the world thought of the West’s
make-believe, as its declared intentions made a total mockery of everything Paris was
meant to be about. But the second point, in terms of the subject of this paper, is al-
most as significant. This was the extent to which the politicians and media in the West
wholly failed to recognise or report what had happened. No one who learned about
Paris only from the press coverage in the West would have had any idea that this was
what the non-Western world was proposing. Few journalists, if any, had ever read the
INDCs. What they reported was only the propagandist fluff dished out to them by the
international climate establishment, as it tried to pretend that anything of genuine
90significance had been achieved.
This was why it came as such shock when, more than a year later, President Trump
announced that he was pulling the US out of the ‘Paris accord’, including the Green
Climate Fund. He was the first Western leader to break silence on the actual contents
of those INDCs (to which he explicitly referred in his speech as delivered), showing
that the ‘accord’ had been no more than a wholly empty sham.
At long last the West’s most important politician had called into question the en-
tire edifice of political illusions that had been so tortuously cobbled together over the
previous 30 years. Whatever we may think of President Trump, or the reasons he gave
for his decision, his speech finally began to undermine that ramshackle structure like
nothing that had happened before.
But he was only able to do so because all those ‘developing’ countries had shown
just what they thought of what the Western world was up to. Beyond some cynical
public relations nods to the need for ‘renewables’, they did not give a fig for what the
Western groupthink had wanted them to do or say: they would carry on with their
economic growth, based on burning vast quantities of precisely those same fossil-
fuels which the groupthink wanted to see eliminated from the earth.
Despite the pretences of the communiqué issued after the first G20 meeting at-
tended by Trump in July 2017, the entire geopolitical balance had decisively changed.
The only countries left committed to carbon dioxide reductions were now those be-
longing to the European Union, along with Canada and Australia, between them re-
sponsible for just 11.3 percent of total world emissions. The only other Annex 1 coun-
tries in the G20 were Japan and Russia, responsible for another 8 percent of global
carbon dioxide emissions. And they, like all the other countries that agreed the com-
muniqué after the Hamburg meeting of the G20 in July 2017, had committed them-
selves to building more coal-fired power stations and thus increasing their emissions.
With that wholly dishonest document, the make-believe of political groupthink
over global warming was more damningly exposed than ever before. 103
But the ultimate irony of all this was that, what had happened in Paris – whether
the climate establishment had got its treaty or not – would have had no influence on
the future of the earth’s climate. This would continue to change, just as it always had
done, thanks to that complex interaction of natural factors, such as the shifting cycles
in ocean currents and the activity of the sun, the very factors which the scientists
carried away by groupthink had long ignored and had never even tried honestly to
understand.
The crucial lesson of Paris was that it marked the moment when the groupthink
finally and irrevocably began to lose its power. It may continue to hold the Western
world in its grip for years to come. But it will become increasingly obvious that the rest
of the world, led by the dynamic and fast-growing economies of the East, is taking
little notice. In fact, this is only one more reflection of the remarkable geopolitical
91shift which has lately been taking place. By one measure after another, politically,
economically and culturally, we have seen the Western world beginning to lose that
pre-eminent place in the world it has enjoyed for several centuries, and the authority
that went with it. Other countries, notably China and India, have been moving up to
replace and surpass them. China’s economy has in recent decades risen to become
the second largest in the world, India’s is catching up fast, and by one measure is
already in fourth place. There are forecasts that by the middle of the century these
two most populous countries will not only have the two largest economies, but that
India might even overtake China.
There have thus been many signs in recent years that the political power and in-
fluence of the West, most notably that of Europe, have been in relative decline. And
in this respect the rejection of the West’s attempt to get a binding climate treaty in
Paris, followed by Trump’s withdrawal even from the little that Paris was claimed to
have achieved, may well be looked back not just as the moment when the great cli-
mate scare finally began to lose it its power. It may be seen as one of the more signif-
icant landmarks in a much wider historical process, the nature of which we are only
now dimly beginning to recognise, and the full implications of which we cannot yet
begin to foresee. Unquestionably we are now entering an entirely new chapter in the
story, and one which leaves Europe and Britain looking very uncomfortably isolated.
Sooner or later, these new realities crowding in from outside will make it very difficult
to sustain the bubble of scientific and political make-believe in which we have been
living for so long.
Indeed, this is why it has become more than ever relevant to recognise the real
nature of what has been driving this flight from reality for 30 years. It has been a
supreme example of the astonishing power of groupthink to carry people off into
states of illusion, which, by definition, must always eventually end in disillusionment.
But the belief in man-made climate change is only one of the countless other in-
stances of the power of groupthink in our world today, all similarly behaving accord-
ing to those rules identified by Irving Janis. That is why I want to end with a personal
epilogue briefly referring to other examples of how his analysis can give us a clearer
understanding of so much more of what we find puzzling about the strange time we
now live in.
9223 A personal epilogue: the wider picture
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds,
while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
There were two reasons why I was pleased to be asked by the Global Warming Policy
Foundation to write this paper. One, as I hope these pages have demonstrated, was
that Janis’s analysis of groupthink can help us to see in a new light the real nature
one of the strangest episodes in human history. But the other was that this has pro-
vided an opportunity to show that his thesis has very much greater relevance to our
understanding of collective human psychology than has been generally recognised.
One obvious reason for this is that, to illustrate his theory, he drew only on those
few episodes in mid-20th century American political history that were the focus of his
study. He showed in each case how a small group of men at the centre of power had
become so obsessively fixed on a particular policy that they refused to listen to any
evidence that might have raised doubts about what they were agreed on. In each
case their failure to consider all its possible consequences led to disaster.
Certainly, more recent history has provided numerous other examples that Janis
could have added to his case-studies. One of the more obvious was the recklessly
obsessive fashion in which George W. Bush and Tony Blair launched their invasion of
Iraq in 2003. So focussed were they on overthrowing Saddam Hussein that they gave
no proper thought to what might happen once their goal had been achieved, with
the result that Iraq was plunged into years of bloody sectarian chaos.
But what particularly struck me when I first came across Janis’s thesis was how
much more widely relevant it is to our understanding of collective human behaviour
than he was able to demonstrate from just his particular rather limited set of examples
(or even than perhaps he himself realised). It can certainly help us to see in a new
light the story of global warming, but once we recognise Janis’s basic rules of how
groupthink operates, we can see other more general instances of it all over the place,
both in history and very much in the increasingly puzzling world around us today. We
can see how, although most cases of groupthink originate only from a small number
of people, those same rules continue to apply when their belief comes to be shared
by ever larger numbers of others, who for whatever reason find their belief appealing
and are drawn into sharing it by the power of prestige and the contagious power of
second-hand thinking.
Precisely because those inside the groupthink bubble cannot think outside it, and
look only for evidence which reinforces their belief, it is impossible for them to have
any serious dialogue with those who question it. Safe in their bubble, they can thus
enjoy a sense of moral superiority over those unenlightened outsiders who disagree
93with them, who can simply be caricatured as just crazy people, dismissed as not worth
listening to.
Any general picture of the part played by groupthink in human affairs must in-
evitably take account of the fact that, throughout history, few examples have been
more extreme than the more fanatical perversions of religion, which is why there is
no more obvious example of this today than those terrorist movements inspired by
Islamic fundamentalism, such as Isis and Al Qaeda, whose members are transformed
by their groupthink into collective psychopaths.
Equally, such a general picture must allow for how the divided world of politics
inevitably becomes prey to all kinds of groupthink, large and small; and how this be-
comes more pronounced the further any group moves towards the ‘hard left’ or ‘hard
right’ extremes of the political spectrum.
This is never more conspicuous than in those countries where a totalitarian regime
seeks to impose its own form of groupthink on an entire population. History provides
us with no more dramatic examples than the great revolutionary upheavals that led
to such regimes seizing power in the first place, as in England after 1640, France after
1789 and Russia in 1917. Each was originally inspired by a desire to curb the powers of
a seemingly oppressive ruling order, but ended up with a new ruling order far worse
than the one it replaced.
Even in democracies we can see much less extreme versions of groupthink at work
in all sorts of ways. And how often in politics we see two opposing forms of group-
think pitched against each other, as in the unusually fractious US presidential election
that led to the election of President Trump or the spectacle of the two rival campaigns
in Britain’s Brexit referendum, where both sides vied with each other to make equally
wild claims that bore little or no relation to reality.
In fact, different forms of groupthink have become such a ubiquitous presence
in our time that when I first came across Janis’s book I realised that I had unwittingly
been writing about examples of it through much of my professional life. One of the
strangest and most conspicuous examples has been the rise in recent decades of
that intense social pressure to conform with all the multifarious ideological positions
which are deemed to be ‘politically correct’. This has become the ‘New Puritanism’
of our time, displaying all the self-righteous certainty we associate with the intoler-
ance of those original Puritans in the 17th century. The sense of moral outrage we
associate with political correctness is almost invariably directed at those who can be
portrayed as having, through oppression, prejudice or discrimination, turned some
other group into a ‘victim’ – of ‘sexism’, ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’ or whatever.
The same fundamental narrative inspires the views of our more fanatical ‘animal
rights’ campaigners. It also lies behind the way the belief in manmade climate change
has become added to the litany of politically correct causes, by seeing the planet itself
as a ‘victim’ which must saved from the evils of ‘Big Oil’, ‘Big Carbon’ and all those other
94malign forces that are threatening it with catastrophic global warming.
My first book back in 1969, was The Neophiliacs: a study of the revolution in En-
glish life in the Fifties and Sixties. This was an analysis of the explosion of social, moral
and cultural change which, in the ten years after 1956, transformed Britain into an
almost unrecognisably different country. Only now do I see how much of what I was
writing about was shaped by those same rules of groupthink. From the rise of ‘pop
culture’ and the ‘permissive society’ to Harold Wilson’s ‘New Britain’, much of it was
essentially based on different forms of collective make-believe, the consequences of
which would turn out to be so different from what had been imagined when that
headlong rush into change began.
In 1979 I made a two-hour documentary for the BBC, City of Towers, tracing how
directly the mess made of Britain’s cities in the 1960s by architects, planners and politi-
cians stemmed from the ‘brutalist’ urban visions of the architect Le Corbusier back in
the 1920s. Again, this was a perfect case-study in how groupthink based on make-
believe can lead to disastrously unforeseen consequences.
I later wrote books about other subjects on which Janis’s thesis can shed revealing
new light, ranging from those food scares, such as BSE, which became such a dam-
aging feature of British life in the late-1980s and 1990s (not one of which turned out
to be based on proper scientific evidence), to the collective psychology behind that
most ambitious political project of our age, the European Union.
And no general account of the power of groupthink these days would be com-
plete without a picture of how it has in recent decades transformed the culture of
the BBC. Its relentless propagandising over global warming has been only one of the
more glaring symptoms of how the corporation’s coverage has become dictated and
distorted by a similarly one-sided ‘party line’ on almost any controversial issue of the
day.
But these widely different examples of how people can get caught up groupthink
have three things in common. One is that their beliefs always eventually turn out to
have been based on a false picture of the world, in some way shaped by the make-
believe that it is different from what it really is. The second is the irrational degree of
intolerance they display towards those who do not share their beliefs. The third is how
ultimately their groupthink must always end up in some way colliding uncomfortably
with the reality their blinkered vision has overlooked.
Every South Sea Bubble ends in a crash. Every form of groupthink eventually has
its day. This is invariably what happens when human beings get carried along by the
crowd, simply because they have lost the urge or ability to think for themselves.
95Notes
1. Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions
and Fiascoes, first published in 1972 by Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston, revised
and enlarged edition published in 1982 as just Groupthink.
2. This was how Bolin was presented, as very much the odd man out, in a two-hour
television documentary entitled The Weather Machine, shown by the BBC in 1974, in
which all the other contributors were predicting the approach of a new ice age.
3. Two earlier scientists predicting that increased human emissions of carbon dioxide
could lead to a rise in world temperatures were the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhe-
nius in 1896 and the British meteorologist Guy Callender in 1938 (after noting the rise
in temperatures since 1910). Both men suggested that the effects of an increase in
atmospheric carbon dioxide could be beneficial, since this would assist plant growth,
including food crops. When temperatures declined after 1940, Callender’s thesis was
largely forgotten, until temperatures again began to rise in the 1970s.
4. Report of the First Session of the WMO/UNEP Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-
mate Change, Geneva, 9–11 November 1988. https://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session
01/first-final-report.pdf.
5. It was agreed from the outset that the IPCC’s assessment reports would be divided
into three parts. Working Group I would be responsible for assessing the science and
extent of global warming. Working Group II would focus on its ‘impact’, Working
Group III would consider ways in which that impact could be ‘mitigated’. The con-
tributions of Working Groups II and III would be expected to depend on the findings
of Working Group I.
6. Two of these were based on surface temperature records. One, jointly produced
by Houghton’s new Met Office Hadley Centre and the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit
was HadCRUt (combining the name of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre with that
of the CRU, plus ‘t’ for temperature); the other was Gistemp, run by James Hansen as
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Both were therefore run
by committed supporters of the ‘consensus’. The other two records were based on a
completely different system, measurements taken by satellites and balloons. One of
these was run by Dr Roy Spencer and Dr John Christy at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville, the other, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) based in California, was a private
company contracted to NASA.
7. Richard Lindzen, ‘Global warming: the origin and nature of the alleged scien-
tific consensus’, Proceedings of the OPEC Seminar on the Environment, Vienna, 13–15
April 1992 (available on Cato Institute website); also interview with Lindzen, Die Welt-
woche, 3 March 2007. This section relies heavily on Lindzen’s paper, because he was
the first major scientist to identify the need, among some, to insist that belief in car-
bon dioxide-induced global warming was supported by a ‘consensus’ of scientific
opinion, just as he was to remain one of the shrewdest critics of that belief for years
96to come.
8. Lindzen, op.cit.
9. Lindzen, op.cit.
10. Houghton J.T. et al.(1990), op.cit.
11. Friends of the Earth was originally founded in the US in 1969 to protest against
nuclear power stations. When Greenpeace was launched by a group of US anti-war
protestors in 1971, their first act had been to try to halt US nuclear weapons testing
on an island off Alaska. Its most famous action had been a bid to halt French nuclear
weapons tests in the Pacific in 1985, which ended in the sinking of its ship The Rainbow
Warrior in Auckland Harbour by France’s secret service.
12. Lindzen, op.cit. Lindzen’s view of the petition was that it showed how global
warming had become ‘part of the dogma of the liberal conscience – a dogma to which
scientists are not immune’.
13. Reported in speech to Heartland conference in New York in 2009 by John H.
Sununu, who had been chief of staff at the White House to President George H.W.
Bush, 1989–1993.
14. At the same time Lindzen was surprised, when invited to a seminar on global
warming at another university, to find he was the only scientist on a panel of environ-
mentalists: ‘There were strident calls for immediate action and ample expressions of
impatience with science’. A congresswoman from Rhode Island acknowledged that
‘scientists may disagree, but we can hear Mother Earth, and she is crying’. Lindzen,
op.cit.
15. Lindzen, op.cit., p. 7.
16. Gore, op.cit, p. 40.
17. Letter to Congressman Jim Bates, 14 July 1988. See website of Heartland Institute,
article by Fred Singer under ‘Environment and Climate News’, 1 January 2000.
18. Letter to Senator Tim Wirth, 18 July 1988. Heartland Institute, op.cit. See also Fred
Singer. ‘The Revelle–Gore story: attempted political suppression of science’, 2003 (see
Hoover website). This account is based largely on Singer’s own version, although in-
evitably this has been attacked by global warming campaigners.
19. New Republic, 6 July 1992.
20. These details emerged from a computer disk containing a draft letter sent by
Lancaster to Gore (Singer, Hoover, op.cit.).
21. Singer himself would be vilified in this way for having participated with Professor
Frederick Seitz, a distinguished physicist and former President of the NAS, in a report
criticising the efforts of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to demonise
passive smoking. The report’s authors were described as ‘corrupt’ for having ‘received
funding through ‘ideological partners’ of tobacco companies’.
22. Twelve years later, in 2004, Lancaster issued a ‘retraction’ of his ‘retraction’ on
a website (‘The Cosmos Myth’ ). However, he omitted any reference to the evidence
97which had come to light during the discovery process of the legal action. This in-
cluded his admission that Revelle had told him that he agreed with the main point the
article sought to make: that the science on global warming was not yet sufficiently
settled to justify drastic action.
23. The authors of this report, published by Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, were
Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, the president and general secretary of the
Club of Rome, updating the message of its best-selling book in the 1970s, The Limits
to Growth.
24. Wall Street Journal, 12 June 1996
25. John Houghton, ‘Meetings that changed the world’, Nature, 9 October 2008
26. Wall Street Journal, 12 June 1996.
27. Paul N. Edwards and Stephen H.Schneider, ‘The 1995 IPCC report: broad consen-
sus or ‘scientific cleansing’?’, Ecofable/Ecoscience 1.1.(1997), pp. 3–9
28. Schneider also insisted that ‘nowhere do IPCC rules explicitly address the ques-
tion of when a report chapter becomes final (i.e. when all changes must cease)’ and
that Santer’s conduct had been entirely within the ‘spirit’ of the IPCC process, (Schnei-
der op.cit, p. 6).
29. Singer and Avery, op.cit. This political background to the IPCC’s 1996 report
emerged in evidence given to the US House Committee on Small Business, chaired
by Congressman James Talent, in August 1998.
30. A graph showing the Middle Ages as significantly warmer than the late 20th cen-
tury had been published in the first IPCC report in 1990, attributed to John Houghton
himself, although he had adapted it from one created by the distinguished climate
historian Professor Hubert Lamb, the first director of the University of East Anglia’s
CRU. It was he who first identified the Medieval Warm Period (although he originally
called it the Medieval Warm Epoch).
31. The two fullest accounts of how the methods used to concoct the ‘hockey stick’
graph came to be exposed were by Andrew Montford, The Hockey Stick Illusion (2010)
and also Hiding the Decline (2012). For a summary, see Christopher Booker, The Real
Global Warming Disaster (2009).
32. For once, Dr Richard Lindzen was able to testify on the 2001 report as an insider,
because he had worked on it as a lead author. He explained to a Senate commit-
tee how, as in 1995, the Summary had again been significantly modified after the
contributing scientists had signed it off, to remove any suggestions of uncertainty or
disagreement. He also described the pressure contributors had been put under by
‘IPCC co-ordinators’, who would ‘go round insisting that criticism of models be toned
down’; and that ‘refusals were occasionally met with ad hominem attacks. I person-
ally witnessed co-authors forced to assert their ‘green’ credentials in defence of their
statements’. (Testimony to Senate Commerce Committee, 1 May 2001).
33. In Mann’s original paper, the use of two different datasets was discernable, if
98somewhat unclear.
34. In fact two earlier attempts had been made to show that the ‘hockey stick’ was
scientifically quite implausible, using very different methods. Dr Willie Soon and Dr
Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute of Astrophysics had in 2003 pub-
lished the findings of an exhaustive meta-analysis of 140 academic papers that used
‘proxies’ to reconstruct past temperatures. 116 confirmed the existence of the Me-
dieval Warm Period, and only seven failed to show it. John Daly had published on his
Australian website a mass of historical evidence to show that the Medieval Warm Pe-
riod did exist. As the Climategate emails were to reveal, these researches also made
Soon, Baliunas and Daly into ‘hate-figures’ for Mann and his co-authors of the emails.
35. For a full account of the story see Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion,
Stacey International, 2010.
36. In fact Pachauri had already been involved in a curious episode in 2004, when
Kevin Trenberth, one of the little group of scientists at the top of the IPCC and a Work-
ing Group I Lead Author, had invited Dr Chris Landsea, the unrivalled expert on At-
lantic hurricanes, to contribute to the next IPCC report. Soon after accepting, Landsea
had been astonished to learn from a press release that Trenberth was to give a wildly
alarmist presentation claiming that hurricane activity was increasing. Landsea wrote
to him to explain that not a single study had supported such a view. Trenberth carried
on regardless, winning widespread publicity for his claim. When Landsea protested
to various senior IPCC figures, its chairman Pachauri replied that Trenberth had ev-
ery right to express his views on hurricanes, and that these were similar to what the
IPCC had said in its 2001 report (to which Landsea had contributed). Landsea replied
that he could no longer contribute to ‘a process that I view as being motivated by a
preconceived agenda and being scientifically unsound’. He resigned.
37. The most obvious historical exception was what had happened in every coun-
try taken over by a communist government, where of course its entire society was
compelled to follow ‘correct thinking’ on all issues, including science.
38. Evidence given by King to the Commons Environmental Audit Committee, 30
March 2004. See also ‘Antarctica will soon be the only place to live’, interview with
King, The Independent, 2 May 2004.
39. See transcript of press conference given by Alexander Illarionov on 8 July 2004,
available on http://www.rightsidenews.com/200807241524/energy-and-environme
nt/results-of-the-climate-change-and-kyoto-protocol-seminar-in-moscow.html and
other internet sources. Also ‘Bad manners at the Moscow Kyoto Protocol seminar’,
Financial Post, 13 July 2004.
40. Richard D. North is not to be confused with Dr Richard A.E. North who features
later in this paper.
41. Written evidence by Rosemary Righter to House of Lords Select Committee on
Economic Affairs, Vol. II, July 2005.
9942. ‘Now the Pentagon tells Bush: Climate change will destroy us’, Observer, 11
November 2004.
43. Analysis originally published on his website by Dr Benny Peiser, when he was
working at John Moores University. He subsequently became director of the Global
Warming Policy Foundation, publishers of this paper.
44. ‘Gristmill, the environmental news blog ’, 19 September 2006.
45. Later in the year, because of this, a High Court action was brought against the
government under two sections of the Education Act, which ordained that controver-
sial or political material could only be used in schools so long as ‘balancing material
was used to show the other side of the argument’. The judge ruled that the film could
continue to be shown to students, but that nine points in it had been demonstrated
to be so incorrect that this was only to be allowed on condition that the schools were
supplied with material explaining this. The Department of Education complied by
sending out a statement 77 pages long. Not one teacher I spoke to from schools
where the DVD was shown had ever seen this document.
46. The other satellite record was kept by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), a private
company contracted to NASA.
47. Svensmark had been working with Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish Na-
tional Space Centre, on a mechanism whereby fluctuations in solar activity, by chang-
ing the amount of cosmic rays hitting the Earth, could influence the formation of
cloud cover. More clouds led to a cooler earth and vice versa. The results of his ex-
periments were striking (but were dismissed by Bert Bolin as ‘scientifically extremely
naïve and irresponsible’). Four months after Svensmark’s work was featured on The
Great Global Warming Swindle, the Royal Society, Nature and the BBC joined forces to
publicise a paper claiming to have demolished his theory. Some years later, experi-
ments at CERN confirmed that it was correct.
48. The story behind The Great Global Warming Swindle had begun the previous
year when its producer Martin Durkin was present at a meeting in Tokyo of the World
Congress of Science Producers. He asked why the world’s major television networks
were paying so little attention to the serious doubts being raised by reputable sci-
entists about the ‘consensus’ on global warming. This prompted an angry response
from a senior BBC science producer, Michael Mosley, insisting that not a single seri-
ous scientist disagreed with the ‘consensus’. So fierce were the ensuing exchanges
that it was agreed that Durkin and Mosley should debate the issue at the Congress’s
next meeting in New York. Here Durkin argued his case so effectively that many other
producers present agreed he had a point. Their reaction persuaded Channel 4 to com-
mission Durkin to make the film, broadcast on 8 March 2007.
49. Hansen, J.E. and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temper-
ature. J. Geophys. Res., 92, 13345–13372
50. One former world leader who had already rejected the IPCC’s position was Mar-
100garet Thatcher, long acclaimed by supporters of the ‘consensus’ as the first to have
given it influential support in 1988. In her last book, Statecraft, in 2003, she devoted
several pages to a total recantation of her earlier view. She voiced precisely the funda-
mental doubts about the ‘consensus’ which were later to become so familiar. Pouring
scorn on the ‘doomsters’, she now questioned the assumption that the chief factor
shaping world climate was carbon dioxide, rather than natural factors, such as solar
activity. She mocked Al Gore and the futility of the costly and economically dam-
aging schemes being advanced to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. She cited the
Medieval Warm Period as having had entirely beneficial effects. And she recognised
how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, left-wing po-
litical agenda that posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.
Not one newspaper reported this remarkable U-turn by the lady ‘not for turning’, and
seven years later David Cameron was still being praised by supporters of the ‘consen-
sus’ as a true ‘Thatcherite’ for his ‘green’ policies on climate change. See ‘Hot air and
global warming’, Lady Thatcher, Statecraft pp. 449–456 and Christopher Booker, ‘Was
Mrs Thatcher the first ‘climate sceptic’?’, Sunday Telegraph, 10 June 2010:
51. For a YouTube interview in which Worthington tells the story behind the Climate
Change Act, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3xseCcfMZY.
52. For example, Jones’s response to a request from Warwick Hughes in 2004: ‘Why
should I make this data available to you when your aim is to try and find something
wrong with it’ (email 1299).
53. ‘The UK Information Commissioner said that ‘more cogent prima facie evidence
of an offence under the FOI Act was impossible to contemplate’, but noted that a
statute of limitations limited their jurisdiction’. ‘New light on “delete any emails”’, Cli-
mate Audit, 23 February 2011.
54. Dr R.K. Pachauri quoted in the Times of India, 1 November 2009, http://timesofindi
a.indiatimes.com/india/No-proof-of-Himalayan-ice-melting-due-to-climate-change
/articleshow/5213045.cms.
55. John McLean, ‘Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings’, Science and Public Policy
Institute, 2008.
56. No one did more to unearth the true origins of these claims than Dr Richard A.E.
North (not to be confused with Richard D. North mentioned earlier). Dr North’s expert
researches were the basis for the exposure of ‘Glaciergate’ in the Sunday Times and my
own column in the Sunday Telegraph, and for my subsequent columns on the IPCC’s
claims over the Amazon and African crop yields (see below): as they were also for our
joint-articles in the Sunday Telegraph on the financial affairs of Dr Pachauri.
57. Laframboise later published a full account of this study in a book, The Delinquent
Teenager who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, Kindle edition, 2011.
58. TERI commissioned KPMG to carry out an ‘informal audit’ of Pachauri’s finances,
which reported that ‘no evidence was found that indicated personal financial bene-
101fits accruing to Dr Pachauri from his various advisory roles that would have led to a
conflict of interest’.
59. ‘Phil Jones: Q and A’. BBC News website, 13 February 2010.
60. The only exceptions were Lord Lawson and Dr Benny Peiser representing the
Global Warming Policy Foundation, the London-based think-tank set up in 2009 as
part of the science-based ‘counter-consensus’ which had been emerging in Britain
and the USA.
61. The five inquiries in the US all came to similar conclusions.
62. In 2015 Pachauri faced allegations of sexual harassment and criminal intimidation
by a young female employee of TERI. He was later given bail by the Delhi High Court
while these charges were formally investigated by the police. He resigned from TERI
later that year.
63. See ‘Sir John Beddington warns of floods, droughts and storms’, BBC News web-
site, 25 March 2013. Like his predecessors as chief scientific adviser, Lord May and Sir
David King, Beddington had no qualifications in climate science; his specialities were
the computer modelling of ‘population biology’ and the ‘sustainable use of renew-
able resources’.
64. The flooding of Brisbane in January 2011 had only become a disaster through
the sudden release of a huge volume of water from an upstream reservoir, which lo-
cal politicians had insisted must be kept full, because they had been advised that
global warming would bring prolonged droughts. The rains forced them to open the
floodgates.
65. In September 2017 there was to be a replay of these attempts to link extreme
weather events with climate change, following the arrival in the Western Hemisphere
of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the first major hurricanes to make US landfall for 11
years. Both storms were claimed to be ‘unprecedented’, and media headlines claimed
that Irma was ‘the most powerful hurricane on record’ and ‘the deadliest storm in
history’. Neither claim was remotely true. Irma‘s maximum windspeed of 185mph
had been equalled twice in the past 37 years alone and beaten in 1980. It ended
up causing 36 deaths, whereas even since 1980 there have been hurricanes which
killed 1100 and 8000 people in Central America. But this hysteria prompted the BBC
and others repeatedly to claim that such hurricanes were becoming ‘more frequent’
and were evidence of man-made climate change. The BBC Today programme even
staged a discussion between a former director of Friends of the Earth and the head of
an Oxford University ‘Climate Dynamics Group’ on whether the world’s top 19 carbon
dioxide-emitting companies could be made to pay for clearing up all the damage
Irma had caused.
66. The Independent was the paper which in 2000 had famously quoted Dr David
Viner, a senior scientist at the CRU, as saying that within a few years snow in Britain
would be ‘a very rare and exciting event’ and that ‘children just aren’t going to know
102what snow is’.
67. See, for instance, post on the NASA website dated 30 October 2013 reporting
its satellite data having shown that between 1992 and 2001 the Antarctic ice sheet
registered ‘a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year’, which had slowed between 2003
and 2012 to ‘82 billion tons of ice per year’. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/
nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses.
68. Slingo’s actual wording was ‘the model that we use for our climate prediction
work and our weather forecasts, the unified model’. http://www.publications.parliam
ent.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/387ii.pdf.
69. Uncertainty, Risk and Dangerous Climate Change published by the Hadley Centre
in December 2004: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/l/1/COP10.pdf.
70. On 9 February 2014 the BBC website quoted Slingo as saying that the UK was
experiencing the ‘most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years. . . we have records
going back to 1766 and we have nothing like this,’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-
politics-26084625. Yet the Met Office’s own historical UK rainfall data showed that
the 544.8 mm which fell in the three months up to February 2014 was still less than
the 554 mm recorded between November 1929 and January 1930.
71. The only MP to question the Met Office’s record was, again, Peter Lilley. On an
otherwise fairly light-hearted BBC programme presented in August 2015 by the Daily
Mail’ s humorous parliamentary sketchwriter Quentin Letts, entitled ‘What’s the point
of the Met Office?’, Lilley mocked the failure of the temperature predictions made
in its 2004 report. This prompted a fine example of psychological projection from
the BBC’s former science editor Richard Black, whose partisan reporting on climate
change had long been a byword. He complained in the Guardian that the programme
had breached the BBC’s commitment to impartiality. Two months later the BBC apol-
ogised for the ‘unfortunate lapse’ by which the programme had ‘failed to meet our
editorial standards’. See ‘The BBC apologises for documentary that criticised the Met
Office over climate change’, The Independent, 7 October 2015.
72. For fuller analysis, see ‘97 percent cooked stats’ by Lawrence Solomon, Financial
Post, 3 January 2011.
73. ‘Debunking climate propaganda earns you a fail’, Christopher Booker, Sunday
Telegraph, 6 October 2012. For a wider look at how the ‘consensus’ orthodoxy had
permeated Britain’s education system, see also Andrew Montford and John Shade,
Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools (Global Warming Policy Foundation, April
2014).
74. Although each of these were analysed at the end of my report for the GWPF in
2011 (op. cit.), it is appropriate to summarise them more briefly here because they so
tellingly revealed just how completely the BBC had fallen into the grip of evangelistic
groupthink.
75. Later in the programme, Delingpole was given similar treatment. From three
103hours of filming at his home, two clips were picked out. In one, Nurse was shown
suggesting to him that, if a ‘consensus’ of doctors agreed he had cancer, he would
not question it. Why therefore should he question the scientific consensus on global
warming? When Delingpole momentarily looked nonplussed by the absurdity of this
analogy, the programme had got what it wanted. In the other clip, Delingpole ex-
plained that he did not ‘read peer-reviewed papers’ on climate change, because he
read commentaries on them by experts better qualified than himself to understand
them. Delingpole could thus be shown admitting that he did not read or understand
‘peer-reviewed science’. Again the programme had got what it wanted.
76. Editorial control over all matters relating to climate change at Wikipedia had long
been taken over by fervent advocates for the ‘consensus’, who ruthlessly ensured that
the contents of the world’s most influential information source rigorously conformed
with the ‘party line’. This included highly critical entries on all prominent ‘deniers’. A
key role was played by William Connolley, a British climate activist (and a co-founder
with Michael Mann of the RealClimate website), who enjoyed the status of a ‘senior
editor’ and ‘administrator’. In 2009 Lawrence Solomon, a Canadian journalist with
the National Post, revealed that Connolley had created or re-written ‘5428 unique
Wikipedia articles’ on climate change, deleted ‘over 500’ and barred more than 2000
contributors from its pages. This revelation of the power he exercised created such
a scandal that in 2010 Connolley was barred from making any further contributions
on subjects related to climate change or exercising any control over Wikipedia’s con-
tents.
77. The day after Jones’s report was published, the Daily Mail serialised the mem-
oirs of a much-respected former BBC newsreader, Peter Sissons, under the headline
‘The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change. . . and I was treated like
a lunatic for daring to dissent’ (Daily Mail, 9 February 2011).
78. The surface data were in fact initially supplied to the GHCN, part of the National
Climate Data Center, which was in turn part of NOAA, under the US Government’s
Department of Commerce. With the addition of further data. These were further
processed and published by GISS, and also contributed to the HadCRUT temperature
record.
79. See ‘Historical station distribution’ on Climate Audit, 2 October 2008; and ‘Sur-
face Temperature Records: A Policy-Driven Deception?’ by Joseph d’Aleo and Anthony
Watts, Science and Public Policy Institute, 2010.
80. For analysis and charts, see ‘RSS continues to diverge from GISS’ and ‘Records
and Adjustments’ (4 and 6 December 2014) on Paul Homewood’s blog, Notalotofpeo-
pleknowthat. See also his posts under ‘Temperature adjustments’.
81. In 2017 Homewood was attacked in a book on ‘climate denial’ published in the
US (repeated in a laudatory review in the Washington Post ) for having ‘offered no ev-
idence to back up his incendiary claim of massive temperature tampering’. In fact,
104every one of his posts was illustrated with ‘before and after’ graphs, comparing the
original with the adjusted data, all meticulously based on and linked to GISS’s own
archive. This can be seen on his website, Notalotofpeopleknowthat, by clicking on
‘Temperature adjustment’ in the subject list on the right, then scrolling down to ‘Mas-
sive tampering with data in South America’ (20 January 2015), and many subsequent
posts.
82. For a detailed account of this story, see ‘New Zealand NIWA temperature train
wreck’ posted in October 2010 on Watts Up With That? This blog had long played a
significant role in exposing the systematic fiddling of temperature data, as had the
US mathematician Tony Heller on his blog Real Science and Dr Jennifer Marohasy in
Australia,
83. When McIntyre questioned Gavin Schmidt at GISS about this, the earlier version
was quickly reinstated. Eight years later, the much greater range of ‘adjustments’ af-
fecting GISS, NOAA, the GHCN and HadCRUt, all remained in place.
84. Interestingly, in 2017 two Australian scientists reported that almost exactly the
same trick had been played with the main record of sea levels, the Permanent Ser-
vice for Mean Sea Levels (PSMSL). Using three data records for the Indian Ocean, Dr
Albert Parker and Dr Clifford Ollier showed how, in each case, significant ‘corrections’
had been made, to give the ‘spurious’ impression that sea levels originally recorded
as stable or falling had instead been sharply rising. This had been done by the fa-
miliar technique of lowering the data for earlier years and increasing that for recent
years. Observing that ‘It is always highly questionable to shift data collected in the far
past without any proven new supporting material’, the authors concluded that ‘the
data-adjusters at PSMSL are attempting to “correct” the sea level rise data that do
not support the conceptualization of a rapidly-rising sea level trend in response to
rising human CO 2 emissions’. See Parker and Ollier, ‘Are the sea levels stable at Aden,
Yemen?’. Earth Systems and Environment, 2017; 1: 18.
85. ‘Paris deal a “turning point” in global warming fight, Obama says’, Guardian, 5
October 2016.
86. The story of how Pope Francis was persuaded to lend the global ‘prestige’ of his
office to this document was not irrelevant to our theme. The passages in the encycli-
cal Laudate Si dealing with global warming were based almost entirely on a briefing
from a body called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Its chief adviser on climate
was one of the most vocal advocates of climate alarmism, Professor Hans Schellnhu-
ber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact. This was why the Pope’s
letter referred to several of the familiar memes in the standard warmist litany: tip-
ping points, ocean acidification, melting polar ice caps and so on. But Schellnhuber,
it was reported, had been recruited for the task by the Argentine bishop appointed by
Pope Francis to be Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Marcello Sanchez
Sorrondo, who was reported as dismissing any scientists dissenting from the climate
105orthodoxy as being ‘funded by the oil industry’.
87. The man initially responsible for this analysis was again Paul Homewood. For his
detailed reports on each of these INDCs, with sources, see his blog Notalotofpeople-
knowthat. Click on ‘Paris’ in the index on the right, then scroll down to ‘older posts’
between 2 October and 30 November 2015.
88. Thanks to Paul Homewood’s researches, chronicled on his blog, it was possi-
ble to report all this more than a month before the Paris conference began, as I did
in the Sunday Telegraph on 31 October 2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/
11968064/Why-the-Paris-climate-treaty-will-be-the-flop-of-the-year.html. No other
newspaper reported any of these facts, although all were freely available on the in-
ternet.
89. See Booker, ‘The Paris climate fiasco leaves UK alone in the dark’, Sunday Tele-
graph, 19 December 2015.
90. Key World Energy Statistics 2016, International Energy Agency.
91. Despite this, it had now become customary for supporters of the ‘consensus’
to claim that renewable energy was now becoming so much cheaper, and that fossil
fuels were being so heavily subsidised that renewable energy would soon be com-
petitive with them. To justify these claims called for such prestidigitation with the
figures that few apart from paid propagandists for the ‘consensus’ were taken in by
them.
92. There is a common confusion (see reference to Tony Blair earlier) between energy
and electricity. Electricity represents less than a fifth of all energy consumed, which
also includes gas for heating and cooking, coal for industry and heating, and oil for
most forms of transport. The vast majority of energy thus comes from fossil fuels.
93. Although in 2011 the European Commission had published its Energy Roadmap
(COM/20111/885) setting a similar 80 percent reduction target by 2050, with reduc-
tions of 20 percent by 2020, 40 percent by 2030 and 60 percent by 2040, this did not
have the force of law.
94. See report by Office for Budget Responsibility on http://budgetresponsibility.org.
uk/efo/economic-fiscal-outlook-march-2017/. Apart from the way windfarms had
come to dominate significant parts of Britain’s landscape, several studies in Britain
and abroad had shown the damage the windmills did to birds and bats, including
species, such as golden eagles, which the law was meant to protect.
95. Although Marxism of course had laid claim to this with its doctrine of ‘scientific
materialism’.
96. See for instance N. Keenlyside et al. (2008) ‘Advancing decadal-scale climate
predictions in the North Atlantic sector’, Nature, 453, 84–88. This paper accepted that
the IPCC’s forecast of a 0.3 ◦ C temperature rise during the current decade had not been
confirmed by the evidence. But this, Keenlyside conceded, was because its models
were not programmed to take account of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream. He
106nevertheless insisted that his own model confirmed that by 2015 the warming caused
by carbon dioxide would re-assert itself, carrying temperatures up to record levels.
97. The IPCC based its claim on two papers. The first, by Church et al., (Geophysical
Research Letters, 16 September 2011), was led by John Church, who had long been the
most prominent advocate for the ‘consensus’ view on sea-levels. This was followed by
Levitus et al., (in the same journal, 17 May 2012). The 93% claim came from the latter
paper. These papers were greeted with huge relief by the ‘consensus’ as providing
a wholly new explanation for the pause in temperatures. By the time of the El Niño
spike in 2016 this was enabling them to claim that the pause had never existed – until
temperatures again dropped.
98. See account of 2004 Moscow conference, op.cit.
99. How appropriate it was that when Strong had to retire in disgrace to Beijing,
after being caught out benefiting from an Iraqi ‘food for oil’ scandal, he should have
been employed in setting up China’s first ‘carbon exchange’ to trade in carbon credits.
Equally apt was the timing of his death back in Canada on 27 November 2015, just
days before the Paris conference began.
100. See ‘An inconvenient truth: “Climate change industry” now a $1.5 trillion global
business’, Washington Times, 11 August 2015.
101. When I sent a draft of this paper to a senior executive in a world-leading engi-
neering firm, he said that even in his organisation ‘the catastrophic impact of man-
made carbon dioxide on climate has swept all before it and is unchallengeable. Our
“green policies” are focused unquestioningly on carbon reduction being the objec-
tive, much more than other sustainable practices. If you question the consensus you
are clearly (i) not of right mind as the facts are “indisputable”, and (ii) a bad person to
boot. Obviously you are not wanting to save the planet’.
102. For calculations of the actual figures, see ‘Paris won’t stop carbon dioxide emis-
sions rising’, P. Homewood, Notalotofpeopleknowthat, 17 November 2015. The more
precise figures he extracted from the INDCs were, for the US and the EU a drop of
1,856 Mt of carbon dioxide, for India an increase of 4,895 Mt, and for China 10,871 Mt.
103. Figures published by Paul Homewood, taken from the Carbon Dioxide Informa-
tion Analysis Center (CDIAC), run by the US Department of Energy, See ‘G20: Leaders
fail to bridge Trump climate chasm’, Notalotofpeopleknowthat, 9 July 2017.
107GWPF REPORTS
1
Montford
The Climategate Inquiries
2
Ridley
The Shale Gas Shock
3
Hughes
The Myth of Green Jobs
4
McKitrick
What Is Wrong With the IPCC?
5
Booker
The BBC and Climate Change
6
Montford
Nullius in Verba: The Royal Society and Climate Change
7
Goklany
Global Warming Policies Might Be Bad for Your Health
8
Hughes
Why Is Wind Power So Expensive?
9
Lilley
What Is Wrong With Stern?
10 Whitehouse
The Global Warming Standstill
11 Khandekar
The Global Warming-Extreme Weather Link
12 Lewis and Crok
Oversensitive
13 Lewis and Crok
A Sensitive Matter
14 Montford and Shade Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools
15 De Lange and Carter Sea-level Change: Living with Uncertainty
16 Montford
Unintended Consequences of Climate Change Policy
17 Lewin
Hubert Lamb and the Transformation of Climate Science
18 Goklany
Carbon Dioxide: The Good News
19 Adams
The Truth About China
20 Laframboise
Peer Review: Why Scepticism is Essential
21 Constable
Energy Intensive Users: Climate Policy Casualties
22 Lilley
£300 Billion: The Cost of the Climate Change Act
23 Humlum
The State of the Climate in 2016
24 Curry et al.
Assumptions, Policy Implications and the Scientific Method
25 Hughes
The Bottomless Pit: The Economics of CCS
26 Tsonis
The Little Boy: El Niño and Natural Climate Change
27 Darwall
The Anti-development Bank
28 Booker
Global Warming: A Case Study in GroupthinkThe Global Warming Policy Foundation is an all-party and non-party think
tank and a registered educational charity which, while openminded on
the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the
costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advo-
cated.
Our main focus is to analyse global warming policies and their economic
and other implications. Our aim is to provide the most robust and reliable
economic analysis and advice. Above all we seek to inform the media,
politicians and the public, in a newsworthy way, on the subject in general
and on the misinformation to which they are all too frequently being sub-
jected at the present time.
The key to the success of the GWPF is the trust and credibility that we have
earned in the eyes of a growing number of policy makers, journalists and
the interested public. The GWPF is funded overwhelmingly by voluntary
donations from a number of private individuals and charitable trusts. In
order to make clear its complete independence, it does not accept gifts
from either energy companies or anyone with a significant interest in an
energy company.
Views expressed in the publications of the Global Warming Policy Foun-
dation are those of the authors, not those of the GWPF, its trustees, its
Academic Advisory Council members or its directors.
Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation
For further information about GWPF or a print copy of this report,
please contact:
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
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I can’t remember when life became so busy/demanding/intimidating or whatever that I stopped posting to this blog. I did however continue writing for a while and I saved those items. Recently I noticed them and decided to concatenate them and publish them in one go. And now I have finally got around to it. Some of them reference the ‘recent’ elections; they are of course no longer recent.

Commentary1, Justice.

I had meant to write a daily commentary on life in general and make a few suggestions for its improvement but illness gave me an excuse to procrastinate and I might well have gone on doing so, despite my recovery, had I not been infuriated by a ‘minor’ news item. Minor in the sense that it was reported with no great emphasis or comment. To my mind a blatant example of the spiteful and ludicrous behaviour of those who manage to be set in authority over us and whom we ought not to tolerate for an instant.

It was simply this. A young woman let her hormones get the better of her and she had sex with her 16 year old stepson. For this she has been jailed. Jailed! For a minor peccadillo that did no harm except to her own relationships.

I had been intending to write a little about the habit of politicians, in particular our own dear Prime Minister and her delightfully modest Treasurer (yes that is intentional irony) when they speak of the large sums of money that they graciously propose to gift to those persons and causes best calculated to result in votes for their particular political flavour. The second most important innovation that I think we ought to introduce into our political system (I’ll mention the first later) is that all such pronouncements should be required by law to contain the phrase ‘Your Money’. ‘Your Government (yes Julia it isn’t ‘your’ government it’s ours, despite being not what most of us would choose) intends to spend x billion dollars of YOUR money on (insert title of latest crack-brained scheme).

But then I realized that little if any attention is given to the constant squandering of OUR money on maniacal behaviour by the teeming host of petty fonctionnaires that we carry on our backs like giant vermin. How many people were involved in dragging this unfortunate girl into jail, simply so that they can exercise their lust for dominance over other people. A whole horde of police, magistrates, lawyers and judges gleefully indulging in their peculiar fetishes at OUR expense. Fun and money – all dressed up to look like some sort of moral salvation – and a young woman’s life ruined for their satisfaction. For there is certainly no benefit to us. Louts who assault and even kill people are allowed to go free or are given some nominal sentence, probably suspended. If they have enough political clout they can break people’s arms or even run them down, kill them and run away without punishment, especially in South Australia, if the press reports are to be believed. And you may be sure that more vast quantities of OUR money would be expended on suing the reporters if they were inaccurate.

It would pose no threat to my safety or my money, nor to yours, if this girl went free.

How many people do you suppose took part in this travesty? How many were allowed to rudely mistreat this girl? How many were fantasising in their minds over the incident involved, mentally drooling whilst acting the part of the moral saviours of mankind? Most, of course, just went through the motions of the police/legal machine, devoid of moral consideration or courage. They MUST all, surely, know that this is WRONG. And not one of them had the guts to say so.

At the time when I heard of this I happened to be visiting friends in Tasmania, where it was reported that the police were setting up a new, special unit to ‘Fight Crime’. Well what the hell have they been doing up until now? Apart that is from arresting and charging young girls for mildly deplorable behaviour. I naively thought that fighting crime was their job; the job that they are paid with OUR MONEY to do. Apparently the various chapters of the wicked motorcycle gangs have been TALKING TO EACH OTHER and coordinating their activities; something that the various police units have apparently not thought of doing themselves. Judging from the numbers of police throughout the country deployed with ‘booze buses’, lurking in hedgerows with radar guns, or employed on other such fund raising activities, it is hardly surprising if Fighting Crime is seen as a novel and unexpected use for their time. You may be sure, however, that it will now be an excuse for wanting to be given more of OUR MONEY – in order to do what we were already paying them to do .

To be fair, the police have very little incentive to Fight Crime. The so-called justice system is clearly modelled on the concepts in George Orwell’s ‘1984’, where he predicted the use of names describing the exact opposite of the function actually performed by institutions, such as ‘Ministry of Love’ for the former ‘Ministry of War’. If police performance is measured and rewarded by successful prosecution, and it is easier to successfully prosecute and jail an inoffensive young girl than a thug or murderer, why would they Fight Crime? With lawyers and court officials unburdened by any personal morality or commitment to actual justice why should the police be the only ones to care? And no-one is so committed, are they? Would any underling stand up and say ‘This is monstrous. Stop it at once; I will take no part in this travesty of justice!’ No. Neither when this young girl is so brutally treated nor when some political lout walks free after doing serious physical harm to one of the people whom he is supposed to serve and protect.

Would I, if my job were a part of that system? When I was young and responsible for no-one but myself, quite possibly. Later, probably not. Institutional injustice rests on the fact that most people dare not risk their livelihood to speak out against it. Their need to keep a job and put the interests of their family first are exploited to control them and blunt their finer instincts. And court behaviour is structured and imposed in a way specifically designed to prevent interference by anyone possessed of a social conscience or any commitment to actual justice.

Most of us have a very simple concept of what is basically right.

People who cause physical harm by an act intended to harm should be punished severely. So should those who deliberately deprive anyone of their money or possessions against their will. These are criminal acts. No amount of legal wriggling should result in any deviation from this. Everything else is a question of social convenience and should attract lesser punishment. And anyone engaged in a criminal act should be considered to have forfeited the right to legal protection. Nothing that occurs to anyone engaged in such an act should give recourse in law.

The so-called justice system has little if any relationship to this concept.

This would be very simple to correct. And it would then be very easy to know what is the right thing to do, and doing the wrong thing would clearly be a deliberate act. That it is not corrected clearly indicates a vested interest in the existing system. This is partly financial; a lot of lawyers make a lot of money out of playing about with other people’s lives. And it is partly the wish that far too many people have to rule the lives of others. Exercising power over other people’s liberty clearly gives some mental deviants a thrill, as does playing lady bountiful with other people’s money. Fairness and tolerance have no place in the thinking of these people.

A final note. The courts should not be a lottery. No-one should be awarded money that they have not earned – although of course the court should order that people be paid money that they are owed, when it is not paid as it should be. If it is desired to financially assist a physically injured person then by all means arrange to pay for whatever services or other aids are required (although a comprehensive Health Service would render this unnecessary). If a person’s reputation is damaged then let it be publicly restored and the perpetrator punished. But no one should expect to use the courts to make money that they have not earned. If they want money they can work for it.

I have quite a lot to say about the detail of punishment but this is not the place for it.

I also have things to say about the relationships of lawyers and politicians.

And a third, related theme, Unions.

These themes will be discussed in later commentaries.

Commentary 2, Political Change.

Winston Churchill once said that ‘our’ system of democracy is far from perfect but it is easily the best system that we’ve devised so far. I think that he was quite right but that is no reason not to try and improve on it. After all, it took until he was 62 years old for him to become Prime Minister and the world might have been saved much grief if that had happened a few years earlier. As it was, his warnings that Germany was intent on war and that there was an urgent need to build an adequate defence against it were ignored until it was almost too late.

The other significant comment was written by the librettist W S Gilbert in the Opera ‘Iolanthe’.

Referring to the actions of the upper house of the British parliament over the preceding 20 years the tenor sings ‘The House of Peers did nothing much and did it very well.’ A sentiment that should resonate with the American Republicans, who claim to consider that less government is better government. Unfortunately their performance in government falls far short of succeeding in this noble aim.

My point is that governments should govern. Not rule. Government was invented precisely to replace rule by individuals. And governing should consist of creating conditions in which we can each live our lives as we wish, subject only to the restraint that we interfere as little as possible with the right of others to do the same.

Of course the greatest impediment to change is the existing politicians, the removal of many of whom would be essential to any improvement.

Commentary 3, Discrimination.

A different area of politics today – discrimination.

When I was young, people reaching the age of 21 were stated to have ‘Reached the age of discrimination’. This had absolutely nothing to do with bad behaviour toward people of different skin tone or religion; on the contrary, it meant that a young person should by that age have acquired the ability to make informed decisions and behave in an adult and responsible way.

I dislike the way that words have their original meaning twisted to suit the dislikes and prejudices of zealots and fanatics. Words were invented to aid communication and they do that best when their meaning is clear and unambiguous. And, as a slight digression from the main subject, I intensely dislike the way in which words invented by people too ignorant to realise that there already exist ones adequate for their purposes are adopted into general speech.

Back to discrimination. Using the word in its present, popular usage, to refer to real or imagined slights or other politically incorrect behaviour against a rapidly growing number of categories or groups of people.

I should first admit to a fairly strong colour prejudice on my own part. Knowing that many people with darker skin tone than mine had been subjected to behaviour ranging from unpleasant to appalling by people whose skin tone resembled my own, I always felt that I should make an extra effort to be pleasant and helpful to any darker skinned people that I met. I realise that that is presumptuous and implies that those people are less able to cope in mixed society, which just isn’t usually true. So I apologise; but I’ll probably keep on doing it. Sorry.

Now, however, the people who don’t have a life have found a new way to pour grit into the smooth running of society. This imbecile proposition is that anyone who chooses to consider themselves insulted IS insulted, regardless of the intentions of the person accused of delivering the insult. And that person is therefore guilty of an offence and should be forced to make reparation.

So far the idea seems to have lost traction but we may be assured that it won’t go away. Unless you have led an extraordinarily sheltered life you will know that there are people who are positively eager to take offence and manufacture insult where none is intended. Just as there are others who scream ‘discrimination’ when the truth is that they are simply NOT equal in some significant area of education, training, or ability, relevant to the situation under consideration.

Now if you want to see a really strong prejudice look no further. I have a policy of zero tolerance toward people who can’t take the everyday bumps and bruises that society routinely and indiscriminately delivers. During my life so far I have, from time to time, been subjected to varying degrees of rudeness and intolerance, unfairness and physical attack. It is my responsibility to handle these as best I can and not scream out for someone else to do it for me, or expect to be recompensed in some way. Unless there is some baseless, deliberate, persistent and inescapable malice at work it is nobody’s problem but mine. And if it happens to you the same applies.

I suppose it is a matter of administrative convenience for some people to class themselves as ‘Black’. Out of all the people whom I have worked with and met, in some 30 or so countries across the world, I have never known one who was actually black. My old friend and colleague of many years ago, Charles, who was originally from Mauritius, had skin of a most attractive, deep purple hue. And I recently saw in the supermarket an extremely tall young man whose skin was extremely dark. Masai perhaps? I have not visited Africa but I understand that the Masai people are very tall and dark. Not black though. My near neighbour, Billy, although an Aboriginal Australian, is no more black than many people to be seen on Mediterranean beaches in summer. Still, ‘white’ people of a certain kind have used to soubriquet ‘blacks’ to lump together large numbers of people who did not necessarily have anything in common other than a strong distribution of melanin in their skin and a totally unjustifiable degree of social inequality. So perhaps those people have adopted the term out of defiance, now that they are gaining enough strength to demand fairness.

For baseless, deliberate, persistent and inescapable malice does still exist to varying degree in most if not all societies. And that includes those in which nobody is ‘white’. And it should concern all of us.

If you know anything about the history of slavery you may know that, contrary to popular perception, the crews of sailing ships did not rush ashore on the west coast of Africa and carry off hundreds of the local people by force. Even had they wanted to, they would have been massively outnumbered by people familiar with their own environment and perfectly competent with their own weapons to defend themselves. No. They went to see the king in one area. The ‘black’ king. And that king’s forces had attacked and overwhelmed their neighbours in order to take their land and goods. An adequate number of the defeated people were retained as slaves for the king and his people and the rest, being surplus to requirements, would have simply been killed, as was the custom in those parts. But these foreign sailors were prepared to buy them as slaves for use in their own country. So the king had them collected and penned up, whilst he entertained the sailors ashore, until there were sufficient to make up a cargo. Then he sold them. And this was good business, so it was repeated, again and again.

In the last century we have had behaviour by ‘black’ people toward other ‘black’ people in Haiti, Liberia, Angola, Rwanda and the Congo that quite equalled and sometimes exceeded the way in which ‘black’ people have been treated by ‘white’ people anywhere.

So we should be very careful when we talk of discrimination in terms of colour.

Then what of gender discrimination?

It exists. Where it exists it is often disgusting and demeaning.

And efforts to stamp it out are in no way helped by people taking extreme positions and indulging in lunatic behaviour. That sort of thing simply gives ammunition to the bigots. If the people claiming to represent those being discriminated against appear to be irresponsible or unhinged, they provide justification for the very discrimination that they purport to oppose. Obviously nobody wants irresponsible or unhinged people in positions of responsibility – although the results of our political selection process seem to defy this statement.

And that, having brought us full circle, will suffice for today.

Commentary 4, Republicanism.

I’m not doing this as well as I might. I ought to have said earlier that I am a migrant. And I feel very strongly that migrants should acknowledge that the place they have migrated to was made the way it is by the people who have already been there a long time. If the migrant thinks it is a better place than the one they left, then they should be grateful. If they think it no better, or worse, they should return whence they came. What they should not do is stay and whine about it. And what they ought not to be allowed to do is attempt to change it into a replica of the shithole that they left.

Isn’t it extraordinary that we make drivers serve a probationary period before they are allowed a full licence, and even then can suspend or cancel it if they misbehave, yet we give migrants full citizenship after a couple of years and let them keep it even if they try to destroy our society; most commonly by inciting others to perform violent criminal acts.

I am embarrassed by having been obliged to take part in elections. I don’t think that I should have been allowed to do so for at least 20 years. I could have spoiled my voting papers but that allows statisticians to count them among the idiot votes; and politicians can do enough damage with accurate statistics; we should not give them false ones to play with as well.

I did not even feel entitled to comment on the political situation until I had been here for 20 years, although I must say that I had begun to form some strong opinions after the first ten.

And now that I’ve got that over and done with we can move on to the topic of the day, Republicanism.

As far as I could judge, the only reason that we failed to become a republic after the last referendum was because of the way in which the monarchist John Howard tied the vote to the method of election. A ‘yes’ vote would have saddled us with a totally unacceptable form of election, so a ‘no’ was inevitable. A simple question ‘Should we have an Australian Head of State’ ought to have produced a ‘yes’ result and probably would have. Messrs Turnbull and Swan please note.

Our present method of pretending to acknowledge the Queen and in reality being represented by a narrowly elected political hack of dubious propriety, selected for the top job by a cabal of self seeking nonentities, ought certainly to be scrapped and the sooner the better. (I might as well call them what they are while I can. If they get their way anyone who so much as criticises them in future will be summarily locked up.)

And here’s a note for Pauline. History tells us that Abraham Lincoln failed as a farmer, failed as a lawyer, and failed in several attempts to be elected to political office. Then he was elected President of the United States of America. So when we do become a republic, give it your best shot, girl. You are already ahead of him in the election stakes. But please don’t follow his subsequent career too closely.

Commentary 5, Election.

Of course it is very difficult to get any improvement in our system of representation because any improvement will result in the ejection of many of those who are currently living well on OUR MONEY and doing little for us in return.

One thought that I had was that lawyers are well over represented in parliament. Although I then discovered that there were 27 pages of them in the Adelaide telephone directory alone, representing a considerable percentage the tiny population of South Australia. God knows how many of them there are today, for that was years ago. And there must be positive hordes of them in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

Nonetheless there are far too many of them in politics. They would much rather argue than do any good and they are far too good at covering their tracks and devising legalised fiddles for themselves and their pals. So:

Innovation: People should be made to choose between the law and politics. Possession of a law degree should bar a person from election to public office.

I note in passing that whereas people in every other profession are required to hold an appropriate qualification, and even tradesmen are required to be qualified and licensed, any idiot can stand for election and far too many succeed in getting elected.

Innovation: People standing for election should be required to show some proof that they have studied history, philosophy and politics in depth, and demonstrated some capacity for understanding them, such as is required for a degree in any other profession.

It follows logically that politicians actually appointed to office should hold higher degrees, as is expected of people promoted to high positions in any other walk of life. We don’t expect people to walk in off the street and perform brain surgery on us; why should we allow similarly incompetent people to run the nation?

Then there is the question of remuneration. In the hard headed world of business it is axiomatic that if you want good managers you have to pay for them. The saying ‘If you pay peanuts you get monkeys’ comes to mind. Certainly a look at the salaries paid and the people currently in the top political offices of Australia at the moment does little to contradict this saying.

But business generally has a short way with non-performers. A few do manage to get away with a sack of gold at the end of their usefulness but most don’t.

Innovation: We should pay our politicians very well whilst they are doing the job and they should make provision for their later lives out of their salaries, as everyone else has to. There should be no freeloading on OUR MONEY once they are out of parliament. (If they are really such crap that they are unemployable in the real world they shouldn’t have been elected in the first place.)

And why oh why does Australia, with a population slightly less than that of Greater London, require NINE governments, one each for eight piddling little States and Territories and a Federal government sprawling over the top like a skin disease. There cannot possibly be enough competent, ethical, trustworthy people in the entire population to provide the numbers for those governments which, in any case, serve mainly to argue with and obstruct each other. And to create conflicting laws. And to make it necessary to go through the stupid rigmarole of re-registering boats, cars, trailers and God knows what else if you move house a few kilometers down the road. Which naturally requires more of OUR MONEY to be paid out to so-called ‘Public Servants’ to handle these pointless transactions. And to go through the ridiculous charade of ‘extraditing’ a wanted criminal from one State to another – although this of course puts more of OUR MONEY into the pockets of lawyers.

But then if we got rid of all the useless paper shufflers and other people in government-created non-jobs the unemployment statistics would rocket. There is an implication that large numbers of physically and mentally able people are totally unfitted for any form of constructive activity and can only be carried on the backs of those who are. And many who are constructive apparently have a mindset that makes them incapable of changing either their occupation or their physical location, so that they are unable to cope with redundancy and reinvent their lives. The car workers are by no means the only example of this, although they are in the news at the moment.

I would prefer to think that the great majority of my fellow citizens are both capable and flexible, provided that they are given the opportunity to demonstrate these qualities.

But what if there are no ‘real’ jobs?

As someone said recently – and I apologise for failing to note down the name of the speaker – an increase in the number of part-time barmaids does not seriously impact the unemployment situation. Governments do not create useful jobs. They could, however, aid and support entrepreneurs who do. Ours, on the contrary, seem devoted to obstructing job creation in every way possible. It is stupid to:

Tax companies for employing people.

Require every business to waste valuable time and manpower filling out GST returns and other non-constructive bumf.

Use the phrase ‘unfair dismissal’ to prevent employers from perfectly fairly dismissing people whom they can’t profitably employ or who don’t pull their weight.

In this context I recall something said to me many years ago by one of my work colleagues: ‘Management are far less interested in getting rid of people than in finding good people to promote’.

And since managements over the years have shown an irritating habit of wanting to promote me out of whatever cosy rut I was in and into some more challenging position I can only believe he was right.

It is surely obvious that a person is employed because the employer stands to gain by that employment. It is absurd to suggest that anyone be employed at a loss. Someone has to make up that loss and, since no employer has a bottomless pit of cash, that means US again.

I seem to have drifted away from the point a bit but it is all relevant really. The question becomes ‘How do we get rid of the politicians that waste our time and effort in this way and replace them with something better?’

Whether or not we establish the requirement to demonstrate basic competence we could do more to make the selection process reflect our wishes. From actual figures it seems that almost half of the population would like one of the major parties in power and almost half would prefer the other, with a small number desperately trying to introduce some alternatives, however ineffective these may turn out to be in practice.

This basically means that at any one time half the population is disenfranchised.

Given the skewed distribution of votes into basically two groups it would surely be practical to declare anyone gaining 25% or more of the votes cast elected. This would usually result in no more than two candidates being elected and probably not less in most cases. I would prefer it to be 25% of the available vote, so that if nobody voted nobody would be elected but I can imagine considerable resistance to that.

In any case, those elected would now more nearly represent the whole population. They might have difficulty in ‘getting things done’ but that, as you now know, is something that I approve of. It is to be hoped that they would concentrate only on things that absolutely must be done and have no chance of playing around with our lives or introducing half-witted social experiments to our detriment. In that context I would also like to see a ‘sunset clause’ on every bit of legislation, so that politicians would have to concentrate on what mattered most and would have little or no time to introduce frivolous measures.

You will notice that this idea would result in doubling the number elected. However, I am also assuming that we would come to our senses and elect only a National government, with constituency boundaries designed to result in an appropriate number of representatives.

I am rather disappointed in the performance of independent members of parliament, and even more so in the case of the Greens. They have shown themselves so desperate to retain their seats that they are willing to keep a thoroughly unpopular government in power. In the case of the Greens, in Tasmania they reneged on a promise to support the party gaining the most public support, and elsewhere they have urged aggression toward Israel – surely a country more committed to greening the land than any other – and made other lunatic pronouncements. So I do think that some evidence of a professional commitment to learning, which will I hope produce a balanced view of life and perhaps strain out the frivolous and unhinged, would be the best place to start.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to get any of the current array of politicians to support any useful form of change. I am sure they will each defend their place at the trough to the death (of someone else, of course) if need be.

Commentary 6, Parliament.

I watched some of the antics in parliament this afternoon. It really is pure theatre. They behave as if we are idiots and, since we do nothing serious about it, they must be right.

The opposition were baiting the Prime Minister and the Immigration Minister by repeatedly asking when they were each made aware of a glaring security bungle. It was immediately obvious from their flannelling that they had no intention of answering, which was sufficient to tell any intelligent person that the answer was ‘ Far later than I should have been’, unless of course the reality was ‘Immediately it was known but I didn’t bother to do anything about it.’ But this charade went on for almost the whole of question time. Interjections by minor players did nothing but provide comic relief and although the speaker did a good job of disciplining the mob it was evident that she, too, was playing a role. The arrogant and undignified behaviour of the senior government ministers was an insult to the entire electorate.

Parliament is NOT a place where points of view are calmly expressed and carefully weighed and considered by all members. Each party has its own agenda and its members have no intention of having their views swayed by reasoned argument and the presentation of facts. For the most part they are incapable of even listening to an alternative view, let alone being swayed by it. And even if they were, their party would discipline them if they showed any sign of independent thought. The few independents support the party in power in order to retain their own seats, and try to make deals in exchange for their support. The fact that they are mostly unsuccessful does nothing to weaken that support.

Where do we look for people more fitted to the job? The one obviously sincere and honest Labor member, Simon Crean, has been reviled and discredited. Kim Beasley, who has the gravitas to make a good Head of State has been cast aside. There was once even the suggestion that a known thug should be a candidate for Prime Minister but that at least seems to have raised too strong a stench for even committed socialists to tolerate. As for Kevin Rudd, it’s good to know that Julia was capable of one action benefiting the electorate. Pity it looks like being the only one. Her present crew of hangers-on show neither dignity nor presence, nor even much intelligence.

The road to the Lodge is strewn with failed candidates of far greater presence and sincerity than the present incumbent. John Hewson is a good man who failed for no discernible, rational reason; Alexander Downer made a tactless but hardly earth shattering remark and was summarily ejected by the self-elected representatives of political purity.

‘Smirking Pete’ Costello should count himself fortunate to be denied the opportunity to be thrown to the wolves. Tim Fisher could bring some dignity and intelligence to high office but he’s probably better off staying in Italy. The Liberals seem to have worked their way down through the putative leaders in descending order of intelligence and credibility. Tony Abbot is a well-meaning chap but he’s obviously going to be knifed within minutes of a Coalition victory. I doubt that his replacement will be selected on the basis of honesty and capability. And it’s difficult to see any virtue in a party that can tolerate the appalling Ruddock in its ranks.

Note to self – must say something about immigration and the treatment of asylum seekers next.

Tying in with my opinion of the Legal Department (I really can’t stomach referring to it as the Justice Department) it’s interesting that Pauline Hanson was thrown into jail with scant ceremony, simply as a result of a dishonest frame-up by her political opponents. Yet none of those responsible have been charged, yet alone punished, for any part in that extremely serious offence. And that same legal system allowed a single judge to reverse the sentence imposed on a senior magistrate who abused her position by disciplining a member of her staff for failing to support her in a personal vendetta against another staff member. Despite the fact the a jury had found her guilty. This one person was able to say that her behaviour was a permissible exercise of her authority, despite the fact that 12 level headed citizens could quite clearly see that it wasn’t.

So we see the usual interplay between lawyers (I include judges in this category) and politicians, condoning serious offences by their pals and distorting the law to damage their enemies. We are still some way from the conditions in totalitarian countries but we are much closer than we imagine and it’s not at all clear what we can do to stop the rot.

Commentary 7, Personalities.

I am finding this very difficult to write. Not because I don’t like writing; I’ve been doing that for pleasure and profit for very many years. Nor is it lack of subject matter; unfortunately there is no shortage of that when it comes to the greed, arrogance and stupidity of politicians. No, it is just that there are so many pleasanter subjects. And other activities, from music to gardening, are so much more enthralling than thinking about politics. But I will persevere.

I probably ought not to tar all politicians with the same brush. There must be SOME who are simply trying to do their best for their fellow beings. Well actually there are probably a lot but it seems that even a number of those are too arrogant to realise that they are there to represent, not rule. And worse, a number of the electorate believe that the idea is to elect people who will look after their interests by trampling over the interests of other citizens. And of course that is exactly what we see happening.

What is quite clear is that the people who end up in ministerial office are mainly what we would describe in the vernacular of my former country as arse-crawlers. The system requires that they toady up to whoever seems most likely to get the top job, and that appointment is made by spin merchants seeking their own advantage. If no other good comes out of the great Rudd fiasco it has made that fact very clear. Why anyone would want a Prime Minister who, whatever his skill in Mandarin Chinese, can’t speak his own language is beyond my understanding.

Will somebody PLEASE explain to Kevin that ALIBI is NOT a synonym for EXCUSE.

Well I suppose that packing up your office in anticipation of a well-deserved defeat may enable you to say ‘I was somewhere else when you lost the election’ but I don’t really think that is what he meant.

Sorry but that’s been irritating me all day.

I thought Penny Wong had a brain but it looks as if she’s just another hand-puppet. All that she seems capable of is regurgitating the same old mindless and meaningless socialist cliches that I’ve been hearing for over half a century. Peter Beatty was the best of a very bad bunch but his fatal flaw was that, for the benefit of his own conscience, he opposed the right of terminally ill people to terminate their lives painlessly and so condemned them to indefinite suffering. To me, that extreme lack of empathy made him entirely unfit for office. In all other respects he towered over those at present in Federal parliament, yet his party chose to ignore that fact. His successor was probably right to leave the stage at the end of her faultless performance. Anna Bligh said and did all that could have been expected of her, yet forces are already at work undermining her reputation with a smear campaign. So another bright star opts out of our orbit.

Back to Federal parliament, Bill Shorten seems to be tipped as the coming man, despite the amount of TV time that Greg Combet took up before his elevation. I think Shorten’s terse response to an amendment seeking to extend the ludicrous anti-bullying legislation to cover Union bullying ‘The government won’t support that’ was as honest as it was unedifying. I have worked on the land, in factories, in offices, on a construction site, and in the armed forces, and the ONLY bullying that I have ever encountered was Union bullying. The best counter to bullying in the workplace, as to all other work-related unpleasantness, is freedom of choice. If there are other employment opportunities, people can simply leave for another job. And good employers are quick to look after the morale of good employees, by ensuring their safety and comfort as far as conditions in the industry allow. Every petty statute that interferes with an employer’s ability to run his business profitably and fairly reduces the choices available to employees, and socialists just love to pile on petty requirements. As do conservatives; they simply do it in different areas, usually in addition to the load piled on by the other side.

For sheer personality Bob Katter stands out. Unfortunately I hear that he has the same callous attitude to the terminally ill and suffering as does Beatty. A pity, as he is otherwise the one force that might actually bring some improvement to the parliamentary process with his new party.

Tony Abbott will of course obey the dictates of his religion. I doubt that he has the moral strength of Christine Kinneally, who is publicly questioning the entrenched attitudes of her faith that have no basis in Christ’s teaching or behaviour.

So who stands out? Poor Joe Hockey may be a great bloke but he looks exactly like the stereotype of the less reputable used car salesman. Malcolm Turnbull had his day; probably too honest to survive. The other contenders – none seemingly worse than Abbott – have faded from view. Even Julie Bishop, who normally shows signs of greatness, was on TV tonight behaving not a lot better than the rest of them. Please stay out of the mud, Julie, we need you.

Maybe I’ll talk about the great ‘competition’ farce next time, with a side serving on the subject of Julia’s commitment to propping up the not-for-profit car industry with ever-increasing floods of OUR MONEY. (Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to just give money to the workers for doing nothing, instead of giving much greater amounts to Ford’s US owners?)

Or maybe banks and taxes. That is a topic that needs its own space. We’ll see.

Commentary 8, Cars and Unions.

Today we have a new example of the disaster of allowing lawyers and politicians to play around at our expense. Our State premier has introduced stringent budget measures, including swingeing increases in fines and registration charges, to stem a deficit blowout (very laudable) and in the same breath announced that a vast and hideous new palace for lawyers to play in is to be built with OUR MONEY.

Not that OUR MONEY will be used to help generate economic activity that will generate jobs and profits. No; it will be squandered on creating a hideous monstrosity in the middle of Adelaide in which lawyers can squander even more of OUR MONEY on their pointless pantomimes. We already have a foul looking excrescence bolted onto the old law courts, not very long ago, to give these parasites more luxurious ‘working’ conditions. If OUR MONEY had not been squandered on that perhaps it might have been invested in activities that could help keep the state deficit within reasonable bounds or even – perish the thought – bring it into surplus.

If we could bar lawyers from entering politics we could hope to have some politicians willing to control their endless appetite for OUR MONEY. If they can’t cope in their present quarters let there be a reduction in the frivolous and vexatious use of the law to prosecute people for trivialities and hitherto unheard of offences. Of all the projects to cancel or curb this should surely head the list.

And this is the best government we are likely to get in this State. Some years ago we elected the opposition Liberals with a majority so massive that they had the freedom to enact whatever legislation they wished. Their response was to get rid of the Premier who led them to victory and replace him with a man of whom the less said the better. Unfortunately he was not removed until he had bankrupted the State and it is hardly surprising that the voters are not anxious for a repetition. The current Labor administration may do little to inspire but even if positively inept it still looks good in comparison with its main opposition. Despite frequent change the Liberals have failed to produce anyone who could inspire the faintest degree of confidence and optimism.

There MUST be better people. Obviously our present way of doing things doesn’t encourage them to come forward. The one spark of hope is that increasing numbers of voters are starting to think for themselves instead of swallowing party propaganda. If we ever reach a point at which the sheeplike creatures who vote for a party label are outnumbered by those who think for themselves, things may change for the better. I doubt that it will happen in my lifetime though.

And talking of sheep, union membership has fallen to an all time low, with less than 20% of the workforce unionised, we are told. There is an obvious problem for unions. No doubt there are still employers willing and eager to exploit their workers but in the main the great days of fighting for a fair deal are gone. Yet if people are paying union dues they will expect action in return. So to keep their membership – and for the leaders to keep their cushy jobs and perks and maybe a free pass into a government ministry – the unions must be seen to be militant. They have to oppose someone; to demand restrictive rules to be applied to employers; even, perhaps in desperation, to legislate what people can say to each other and to invent behaviours that they can then claim to fight against.

And so far they are remarkably successful. Those 20% of the workforce now have massive representation in parliament. It is to be hoped that the remaining 80% will make their voices known at the next election.

I don’t know what proportion of the remaining union membership is employed in motor manufacturing and its supporting trades. Quite a lot I imagine. And this of course explains our Julia’s determination to prop up never-to-make-a-profit motor manufacturing with unlimited amounts of OUR MONEY.

It’s a strange business. Many years ago British Leyland apparently carried out extensive market research to discover what would be the product likely to sell the most. I don’t know if they employed Homer Simpson to do the research but some of you may recall the Simpson’s episode in which Homer’s long-lost and recently found brother asked Homer, as representative of the common man, to design the next model for his motor manufacturing business. Given Homer’s character the result was a foregone conclusion and his brother was bankrupted. British Leyland produced the P76, an ugly, gas guzzling car that pre-dated Homer’s design by a quarter of a century. But it enjoyed the same success. British Leyland is no more.

I find it fascinating that Mitsubishi’s last act here was to produce a huge, ugly, gas guzzling car, and that the government of the day bought them in quantity. I once found myself following not one but two of them, with government plates, each with a single occupant, through the city one day. About what you would expect. Nor was I surprised when Mitsubishi found the exercise unprofitable and slunk away.

Now Ford, unwilling to produce anything but one of the two iconic Australian gas-guzzlers of all time, is packing its bags. And Holden, belatedly aware of the folly of expecting continued sales of the other guzzler, has at last noticed the horde of smaller and smarter foreign designs flooding the country and begun production of a single competing design. I wonder what their market research says? Something like ‘Just hang in there and the government will keep paying’ perhaps.

If they go will there be enough union members left to help union officials into cushy jobs in government? Obviously Julia is taking no chances.

Given the shrinking number of players in car manufacturing, this seems a good time to segue into some remarks about competition. But it’s getting late so I’ll save them to next time.

Commentary 9, The Farce of Competition.

A little diversion into an area where legislation, if we really must have it, could do some good.

Unfortunately there is any amount of legislation but none of it good.

We are told that competition in business is a GOOD THING. And the government pays a bunch of lawyers – with OUR MONEY remember – to investigate anti-competitive behaviour and do little about it.

But the idea of competition in business is to destroy your competitors and take their business. It is not a game. It is basic survival of the fittest, which means ‘still be around when the rest are dead’.

And so we have a whole mass of apparently separate businesses which are in reality simply arms of the same octopus. And it is something that ought to be made very obvious.

It is not unusual for a company that has been gobbled up by a larger one to continue to operate under its original name. This despite the fact that the new management may cut costs to improve profits by lowering standards, getting rid of skilled workers and generally reducing the quality of its products or services.

A premium is generally paid for the ‘goodwill’ of the business being purchased – ‘taken over’ means much the same thing apart from being generally a less honest transaction. And that goodwill is a reflection of the quality of the goods or services provided by the purchased business. There is no obligation to maintain it however, so customers may be sucked in for some time, until they realise that the business name is no longer an indicator of the quality that they were expecting.

And the government, whilst extolling competition, actively promotes the merger of banks and other large organisations. And it allows near-monopolies to hide behind a facade of bought-up names.

(To be fair to the banks, they don’t seem to do this. They gobble up their competitors alive and leave no trace.)

Now I’m not sure what the best deal for us all is. But monopoly has historically not been regarded a GOOD THING for anyone but the monopolists. Companies that swallow or effectively control other companies should be obliged to put their own name on them. Perhaps retaining the original name for a year or so, to benefit from any goodwill that they have not yet had time to destroy, but then using their own name only, e.g. Wesfarmers.

When only this name appeared on each of the multitude of businesses that this company actually controlled we would at least be made clearly aware of the degree to which it was destroying its competitors and we might choose to support some of them, even at a higher cost to ourselves, in order to keep some choice for ourselves.

And how were the co-operative societies destroyed? Somebody found a way to extract money from them, money that the somebody had done nothing to earn. And the usual gang of lawyers devised ways of breaking into them – and eventually selling any survivors to foreign owners.

It is a very nasty mess and the only clear thing is that those Australians still lucky enough to have employment are working hard to enrich societies other than their own. The only pockets being lined belong to the people who support and enable these things. We won’t see them doing anything to improve matters.

Commentary 10, Cars and Migration.

I have been too busy with serious activities such as reorganising my shed and repairing my daughter’s caravan to spend time commenting on such trivia as politics lately. But I said I would try to keep it up, so here goes.

Today’s hot topic is Holden’s announcement that they need to cut production costs if they are to continue manufacturing cars in Australia. Predictable screeching and hair tearing in the political asylum. And the usual references to billions in ‘government money’ having been paid out to keep this loss making activity going. No. It is OUR MONEY. And Holden’s management tell us that they loose money. Well WHY? If they aren’t making anything out of it why do they bother.

Because of a deep social commitment?

Because they have so much money that they don’t mind losing a bit?

Because someone is forcing them to?

I rather doubt it.

How about because a good slice of the ‘government subsidy’ aka OUR MONEY goes straight into their pockets?

Sound more likely? You betcha.

And the workforce is adamant that they won’t work for less. Meaning that they want US to subsidise their loss-making activities with OUR MONEY, as well as showering the damn stuff over their bosses

I will vote for the first politician to say that people who have worked all their lives at useful and profitable activities should NOT be required to prop up artificial employment for people who are unwilling to get off their arses and find worthwhile work. Especially if he or she also flatly refuses even to consider giving free handouts to established foreign – or even domestic – companies.

And now I will jump to the other hot topic, migration.

Almost all of the non-indigenous people who created modern Australia came from countries that have a history of past invasions and civil wars, autocratic and dictatorial rulers, and religious conflicts. And most of the citizens of those countries stayed, fought and strove to overcome those things and establish free and democratic states. And most succeeded. The migrants to Australia generally came for greater employment or commercial opportunities and a warm climate. And most worked hard for very little financial reward.

Nowadays the world is flooded with people who find it easier to run away from what they don’t like and plonk themselves down elsewhere, expecting to be subsidised and kept until they can find what they consider a comfortable and lucrative source of income, if indeed they bother to look at all. And the politicians of the developed countries seem strangely willing to foster this attitude.

It is very harsh to suggest the people should stay in their own country and rid it from tyranny and violence by their own efforts and sacrifices. But is it not just as harsh to say that people whose ancestors did in that way establish peaceful and economically stable societies in their own countries ought to have their social structures overloaded and destroyed by people who are simply running away from their own problems instead of staying and fixing them?

Australia is not the worst affected, in terms of raw numbers anyway. Most European countries are struggling with a huge influx of people who, far from being grateful for sanctuary, are quite prepared to destroy the established society and behave in the very ways that they claim to have fled from. But Australia has a small population and lacks the resources to support a much larger.

I must also confess to a particular concern; the apparent urge to divisiveness that seems to grip much of the world’s population. Australia is already divided into piddling little states that can’t agree on such simple matters as criminal law. At what point will the new occupants start agitating for complete autonomy and the breakup of federation?

Consider a hypothetical country. This country is populated by two races, each with their own language and customs. All citizens have equal rights. Their two languages have equal official status and to provide complete fairness government business is conducted in a third language that is widely used throughout the world. Intermarriage is not uncommon, racial features are not notably different.

Now suppose that one of these races decides that it should own one half of the country outright, and some of its members decide to kill a few of the other race to convince them that they must concede half of their country. Then there are predictable reprisals, escalation, and 25 years of bloody conflict, random murder of nationals and foreign visitors, failed intercession by neutral forces and eventually a desperate, bloody battle by the forces of a government that has tried every expedient short of giving away half of its territory.

Should such a country exist, one would have to hope that the losing side would not then emigrate en-masse to Australia and start making similar demands there.

Commentary 11, Legislation gone mad.

Another interesting news item. Our sainted government is intending to pass 100 pieces of legislation into law in the final two weeks of this parliament. Why don’t these bloody people get a life? We don’t NEED 100 pieces of legislation EVER. This is all due to lawyers splitting hairs and creating complications so that other lawyers can make a fortune arguing with each other over the exact meaning of some damn petty regulation. WE DO NOT NEED THIS CRAP. All of the necessary legislation was written down 2000 years ago; it’s called the Ten Commandments. Stick with those and society will run perfectly smoothly with no need of statutes or orders in council or other lawyers’ mumbo jumbo.

Commentary 12, Legislation gone madder.

Once again we descend from the general to the specific. I disliked Julia; not just because she was a liar and apparently not too financially honest either but because she would insist in telling us all what Australians want. Well I’m an Australian and mostly they were things that I don’t want and nor do a good many other Australians that I know. But it really does seem a great shame that her one really useful achievement, getting rid of the obnoxious Rudd, should be undone at the last moment.

For the record, I would prefer a whole cabinet of Julias to one Rudd in any position. But I would be much happier with neither option.

Interesting that it was the equally obnoxious Shorten who tipped the scales. And how noble of Penny Wong to hasten into the new cabal ‘For the benefit of the nation’! It would be quite wrong to assume that Ms Wong might gain any personal benefit from this bit of blatant toadying I suppose. There really ought to be an old saying that rats desert a sinking ship much faster when they can claw their way onto another nearby – even though the buoyancy of that one may be rather questionable.

All in all I have been disappointed in the way women have failed to achieve very much in Australian politics. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect them to rise much above the level of mediocrity achieved by their male counterparts but I always imagine that they will, perhaps because my experience is that women in business so often outshine men. No doubt that is because they have to be outstanding in order to progress at all; perhaps getting elected is easier but I would have thought that for a woman to fight her way up through the closed ranks of the political establishment – particularly the neanderthal specimens that populate the leftist ranks of politics – would require far more than ordinary toughness and determination. Perhaps the struggle exhausts them, so they become bereft of ideas – and of ideals.

Heigh-ho, what does it matter? It’s all about rearranging the bloody deckchairs on the Titanic again. We will have an election. Nobody with any different ideas will be elected and even if they were they would not prevail against the stupefying weight of vested interests that our current parliamentarians bring with them. Do they have surgery at birth or is it as WS Gilbert said, they are all born into one ‘side’ of politics or the other?

Now there’s a thought. In a nation obsessed, so it seems, with ‘Sport’ – which really means contests between mostly foreigners, hastily given visas, representing allegedly ‘local’ or even ‘national’ teams – is there actually anyone even interested in original ideas, let alone capable of conceiving them. It is very noticeable that spokesmen – they are never women – of the ‘left’ persuasion are frequently those of distressingly familiar ilk originating from the more northerly parts of the British Isles, from where, presumably, the locals became so nauseated by them that they drove them out. The main characteristic of those on the ‘right’, however, is a remarkable degree of nonentity although in a few cases, of which the despicable Ruddock is the prime example, this is combined with a striking capacity for viciousness.

I must admit that my own opinion of these people is formed only from their public pronouncements on radio and television and, in the case of those elected, their actual behaviour in Parliament. I hope that I have more sense than to be unduly influenced by press reports, which are always partisan, or the idiotic trick questioning employed by radio or TV interviewers. Are those elected the inevitable result of ‘democracy’ of the ‘everyone votes’ persuasion? Watching some people behaving half-wittedly in a car recently, my wife said ‘And they vote’, to which I replied ‘Yes, and it shows’. So if we want at least half-way intelligent politicians perhaps we have to find a way of excluding those electors who are incapable of rational thought. I have the usual problem with this; how can we trust the people who will do the excluding? Of course, we can’t. We just have to hope that the mentally competent will one day be in the majority.

Nothing shows the degree of unbalance among the electorate more clearly than the many opinion polls to which we are treated with such frequency. How on earth can so many people change their likelihood of voting for the same old gangs on an almost daily basis, responding the most trivial incidents or statements regardless that the main parties remain, in the favourite phrase of an old friend of mine, ‘same dog – washed’. Socialists will still carry out lunatic social experiments at our expense – and failing; conservatives will go on trying to enrich the few at the expense of the many – and succeeding. Greens and independents, we now know, will support the least popular party for ever if it means retaining their own seats and screwing a few insignificant favours from those in power. Doesn’t leave many options does it?

Am I doing people an injustice? Perhaps they are really quite consistent and just so disgusted with the intrusiveness of these polls that they change their answers at random. And faced with only unpalatable alternatives why would they want to encourage either? Now a poll that asked ‘Which of them don’t you want a bar of at any cost?’ could be both illuminating and entertaining.

And do people really want this endlessly increasing interference in their lives? Some quango consisting of a bunch of lawyers well overpaid out of OUR MONEY has just decided to fine an Internet company for false advertising because, although they honestly stated the monthly cost of their service, they failed to say that there was a sign-up cost. Well for God’s sake! The customers would have been told about that before they signed up – and it’s a perfectly normal practice. Surely there is plenty of genuinely sneaky advertising and sharp practice that they could have investigated but it’s typical lawyer/politician behaviour to find some way of penalising an unsuspecting citizen or company for something that nobody even suspected was an offence until then.

I’ve spoken before about the police wanting extra sums of OUR MONEY to begin FIGHTING CRIME – presumably because they are spending all of the money that they have already received on more trivial activities. Now we see a sort of pseudo police playing more purposeless games at OUR EXPENSE. What is it that impels this endless striving to find pointless and unprofitable ways of interfering in peoples lives whilst neglecting the obligation to protect them from deliberate and malicious acts?

Innovation. Introduce a law of simple triage.

Ask ‘Was anyone harmed?’

If the answer is ‘nobody’ either dismiss the charge or refer it to minor tribunal to deal with.

If yes, ask ‘How?’

If the answer is ‘Physically’ ask ‘Was it by a deliberate act intended or likely to cause harm?’

If yes, refer to criminal court. If no, refer to accidental injury tribunal.

If the answer was ‘Financially ask ‘How significant was the sum involved in relation to the plaintiff’s circumstances?’

If not very, refer to minor tribunal to deal with.

If yes, refer to Fraud tribunal.

As I have said elsewhere, the courts should not be a lottery.

No playing lady bountiful with other people’s money. Support for injured people should not be conditional on the manner in which they were injured, nor should it consist of cash handouts. A national scheme should provide for all necessary medical expenses and support equipment for as long as necessary, for any injured citizen regardless of how injured.

Other financial powers should be confined to enforcing payment of legally incurred debts and the return of monies wrongly obtained, including reasonable interest. (This latter field DOES offer some scope for action, such as recovering amounts wrongly retained or improperly moved by banks, which are notoriously casual in the ways in which they delay payments and retain monies for their own benefit, to the detriment of their customers.)

And whilst we are on the subject of JUSTICE as opposed to LAW as currently practiced, a word or two about punishment.

Punishment should be equable. A $100 fine for a person whose total income is $400 a week is NOT the same punishment for a person whose income is $4,000 or $40,000 a week. In fact it is impracticable to scale fines to income and by and large courts should not be in the money collecting business anyway. The armed forces have a fine tradition of inflicting inconvenience and discomfort for minor infringements and this method should be employed.

Commentary 13, The Stench Rises.

Why don’t I put this stuff on facebook? Well looking at the behaviour of the Great Unwashed who inhabit that place doesn’t lead me to suppose that thinking is one of their activities, and I am hoping to encourage thinking and constructive criticism by this blog.

Apparently a few million of those screaming loonies rushed to abuse the couple of young people whose joke phone call to a London hospital apparently triggered a tragedy. I say ‘apparently’ because nobody with any sense would anticipate that redirecting a fake call would cause anyone to take their own life. The call MAY have been the final incident that caused the tragedy, although we don’t know that, but it certainly was insignificant compared to whatever caused the unfortunate recipient to feel so desperate. If vilification were appropriate it should be directed at whoever caused or compounded that desperation in the first place.

However, the harm done to those young people by the spite and vindictiveness directed at them clearly IS the fault of the abusers and no-one else. It is certainly enough to make those two contemplate suicide and it seems to me that the abusers should have to answer a charge of deliberate mental cruelty. Bertrand Russell wrote of the innate cruelty in the human race, citing how when a heretic made a particulary spectacular recantation they might be granted the mercy of strangulation before being thrown into the flames, and how the crowd would then become aggressive and threatening because it had been denied the pleasure of seeing the victim writhing in agony as she or he burned to death. No doubt the loonies who wrote to facebook are their direct descendants.

All of which is another digression, as I had meant to say something more about our woefully defective legal system. (By the way, if you want to bet that Eddie Obeid and his pals get off scot free I for one won’t take your money.)

I was actually thinking that it is a pity that nobody ever says ‘What good will this (prosecution or sentence) do? And perhaps even more importantly ‘What harm will it cause?. Well maybe a lot of people do ask those questions but it isn’t the responsibility of anyone with the authority to DO something about it to ask them. Everyone in authority allows the ‘Letter of the Law’ to override decency and good sense. I think moral cowardice may be a formal entry requirement in the Law and Politics

I happened to watch a bit of one of those boring ‘Border Security’ or whatever, programs on TV recently. A young man was being refused entry to Canada because he had at some past time been banned from driving for a while in England. This raises some interesting questions doesn’t it? The punishment for an offence of any kind clearly includes details of that offence to be broadcast to all and sundry so that they can inflict further punishments for the rest of the person’s life. I think the courts should make that clear in each case.

I have always seen the paradox in branding someone a criminal so that no one will then employ them or trust them with capital, thus preventing them from making a living by any honest endeavour as an employee or in business. Obviously once a criminal always a criminal, regardless of any desire to be honest. I can see that people feel that they should be warned about those who have been convicted – even though it is obvious that there are far more dishonest people enjoying the freedom to continue fleecing their neighbours simply because they have enough of their victims’ money to hire the best lawyers and grease the right palms. But publishing details of a motoring offence so that a person can be denied a holiday visit to another country? That simply stinks.

I suppose this is a new thing, as I was allowed to visit Canada, despite having had a couple of speeding fines and a parking ticket in the past. Obviously I won’t be going there again – I don’t want to pay to fly all that way and then get put on the next plane home. In fact I wonder if there are any countries that I could now visit. Or would even want to if that is the way they behave.

Next time I must talk about ‘Reduced to Penury’ which I advocate as an appropriate punishment for crimes of the ‘Bond’ persuasion.

14

OK. Reduced to Penury.

I suppose it was the Alan Bond business that started me thinking of this but it fits very well with my concept of punishments that should inflict appropriate pain on the offender. According to reports, Bond spent, along with other fraudulently obtained sums, the entire contents of the pension funds of the companies of which he gained control. Now the first thing that comes to mind is that the names of every one of the pensioners whom he defrauded should be recorded as the winning syndicate for the successful Americas Cup Challenge by Australia 11. After all, they paid for it.

But the fact remains that Bond, after serving a notional sentence in vestigal custody, was free to take up his activities once more and was reportedly soon living a millionaire lifestyle in London. As far as I know he still is.

And the pensioners whom he had defrauded were sentenced to live out the remainder of their lives in relative poverty.

My contention is that Bond, and any other convicted financial fraudsters, should be sentenced to be Reduced to Penury. By that I mean that they should possess NO financial assets of any kind and have access to no more than the basic age pension. And it should be made very clear that ANYONE attempting to alleviate this by providing him with money, accomodation, or goods would be liable to the same penalty.

In Bond’s case I think ‘for the remainder of his life’ would be appropriate. His passport would be cancelled of course and anyone attempting to aid him in leaving the country would be subject to the same penalty. He would only be sharing the fate of the people he had defrauded, so it’s hardly a harsh punishment.

For other criminals the length of sentence could be reduced if thought necessary, to reflect the gravity of their specific offence. But they should have at least a taste of what they were prepared to inflict on others.

Electronic tagging and a requirement to report to police daily would help to keep track of their lives – with no money they wouldn’t have much to occupy their time anyway.

As far as I know, no action was ever taken against the person who returned Skase’s passport to him, enabling him to take his stolen wealth and flee to Spain – where no doubt a fair bit of it was paid out to enable him to avoid extradition. I think that was a good case for Reduction to Penury and I think any banker found to have transferred funds out of the country for a fugitive would be a good candidate also.

That brings us back to another of my hobby horses, responsibilty and accountability. Decisions are made by individuals; they may scheme to obtain some sort of group decision to protect their hide, in which case the individuals comprising that group – board, committee, council, whatever – should understand that they will all be personally accountable for the decision. And will be each liable to the same punishments for offending behaviour which results from that decision as would apply to an individual making that decision.

And speaking of inequity – which is what I have been doing, in case you didn’t notice – if you are poor and suspected of dishonesty you are rounded up by police and brought before the magistrates, who ignore anything that you say and throw you into prison. Or, if the offence is considered beyond their jurisdiction, they send you before a judge who does the same thing.

If, however, you are rich and politically connected, there is an extremely expensive enquiry, which makes lots of lawyers rich, and THEN, if you are found to be guilty of some skulduggery, a decision is made WHETHER to prosecute you. More lawyers then become rich attempting to prevent this – usually successfully. In the event that they fail, they become even richer performing a farce in court that ends in your eventual release. And even then it only takes a fraction of the money that you have dishonestly obtained.

Should you have trouble believing this I suggest that you follow the Australian news over the next weeks and months, during which the second act of one of these farces will be played out exactly as I have described above. And nobody in authority will stand up and protest at the futility and waste of it.

Now for a quick look at contemporary politics.

Once again the Great Unwashed have spoken. Labor under Julia – BAD! Labor under Billy Bunter – sorry, for younger readers unfamiliar with the unpleasant fat boy of last century’s comic strips, Krudd – WONDERFUL.

OK there is no credible opposition; Abbot says nothing, fluently, and poor old Joe looks more like a used-car salesman every day. The Greens are not so much mentally defective as mentally devoid and the Democrats effectively shot themselves in the foot by basing their attempt at revival on a set of policies from cloud-cuckoo land. The splinter parties have nothing worthwhile to offer except a few parish-pump sweeties for oddballs and the independents have been thoroughly discredited by the actions of those who are now slinking away.

I wonder how long it will take Shortarse to stab Krudd in the back if he wins again – which is regrettably likely. No doubt this time Shortarse will want to take over himself, rather than elect another puppet. His last one wasn’t very biddable after all. I wonder if the Great Unwashed realise this – and whether they even care.

It’s not even good theatre. More like a fifth rate sitcom, suitable for screening at 3am, between Home Shopping and DIY Surgery.

15

Well, well, well, we are to have an election at last. We will be expected to choose between unpalatable alternatives and will NOT have the facility to indicate that none of them are, in our opinion, worth a vote.

My wife and I agree that voting papers should have the provision for abstention to be registered and that the number of abstentions should be published. This would give a useful indication of the degree of confidence that the public have in the candidates. And might encourage some better ones to come forward.

We have been discussing whether our responsibilty as citizens is to refuse to attend the polling station (this is compulsory in Australia) also refuse to pay any fine resulting from this, and therefore go to gaol in order to make our point. After all, better people than we have gone to gaol for their political principles.

We decided that we would be quite willing to do this except for one problem; it appears that a majority of our fellow citizens actually WANT to vote for the bunch of dodgy incompetents that pass for candidates here; so what is the point in making sacrifices to improve the system for them?

The other scheme that I am rather fond of is that anyone who can command over 25% of the available vote – not merely of the votes cast – should gain a seat. It’s unlikely that more than two candidates will achieve this and it does offer the possibility of a spread of views in debate rather than polarisation toward one or another incompatible ideologies.

The ABC has cooked up a scheme for seeing how well people’s preferences accord with the stated intentions of the main parties. That would be quite useful and interesting except for the fact that the parties not only have no obligation to do what they say, once in power, but all have a track record of welshing on their promises as soon as they achieve power. And I don’t mean when they are forced by outside influences to change their plans; they do it whenever it suits them to do so.

Their statements have no purpose beyond the short term aim of gaining votes.

There has been much loose talk about who is the most ‘fair dinkum’. I can’t see myself that there is much to choose between 2% fair dinkum and 3%, which is about as much of any of them is.

16

Job Creation! There’s a popular political tag for you. Every politician and his or her dog claims to be able to create jobs. Let’s think about that for a minute.

We know that due to the preponderance of lawyers in politics there is a constant creation of statutes and regulations that:

a. Are almost incomprehensible, requiring an army of lawyers to interpret them and a second army of lawyers to argue with the first, and

b. Require an army of ‘public servants’ to implement them and impose them upon the public.

If we define ‘job’ as any activity for which the person performing the activity is paid, then this creates jobs – and they are certainly well paid.

If, however, we define ‘job’ as ‘something constructive that contributes to the wealth or wellbeing of society’ we can discount most of the foregoing.

There is still plenty of scope of course, not only in directly constructive activities like agriculture, engineering, manufacturing, mining and construction but also in those areas that support activity, make life easier and provide fun and recreation. Cleaning, shopkeeping, servicing, road-mending, hospitality, hairdressing, transport, communications, entertainment, education, medicine – the list is almost endless. But all the items on this list have one thing in common, they consist of people doing things to benefit other people – either producing something of value or helping to share out the benefits of production between everyone.

But the people on the second list have to carry the enormous burden of entirely supporting those on the first.

Whether entrepreneur, manager, technician, specialist or workman they all have to contribute to the support of this massive collection of drones. And when the government creates more of those non-jobs it simply dilutes the wealth of those performing actual work.

It’s not only the fat salaries and free motor cars and other perks; the expenditure on accommodation for the drones is stupendous. The Australian Tax Office spreads its tentacles across a swathe of first class office accommodation; the so-called ‘Justice’ departments are provided with lavish premises at the expense of the wealth creators. And these are obvious examples. The spreading tentacles of government at all levels act like a wasting disease on society. The wealth created is in fact bled off to such an extent that it is impossible to accumulate capital to fund more wealth creation. So all enterprise has to be funded by bank loans at exorbitant interest. Bank profits are soaring even as the economy crashes in flames.

Jobs are created by entrepreneurs; people who are prepared to risk everything and make enormous efforts for the promise of great reward – eventually. And employers employ people so that they can make more profit than by their own individual effort. It is absurd to expect them to employ people at a loss and ridiculous to suggest that they want to get rid of them when they are making a profit. Oh there will always be a few crappy employers who want to exploit those who work for them. The cure for that is simple; when there are ample employment opportunities an employee who is unhappy with his or her job can simply go elsewhere.

So, how do you create jobs; real jobs?

1. Allow and encourage the accumulation of capital.
2. Provide support for startup enterprises.
3. Allow employers to hire and fire as they see fit.
4. Reduce the manpower needed to comply with regulations to an absolute minimum, by keeping those regulations as few and as simple as possible.
5. Savagely reduce the number of parasites that the creators of wealth are obliged to support.
6. DO NOT support failing enterprises with OUR MONEY. Don’t give it to the owners of inefficient businesses and don’t use it to subsidise freebies for fat cats in the ‘Public Service’, so as to prop up those failing businesses.
7. If you really must have regulations, regulate the degree to which one business may gobble up others. Once a business is sufficiently powerful to distort the market it destroys the very enterprise culture that creates jobs.

Well that’s a start. I have not heard anyone in our political galaxy talk about any of this so far and I very much doubt that I ever will.

I don’t suppose any of them will propose getting rid of our absurdly complicated tax laws either, although there are ludicrously simple alternatives. All of those tax inspectors, tax agents, and tax lawyers would have to get real jobs wouldn’t they? A few weeks mucking out an abbatoir would do them good.

17

I try to be fair and acknowledge that politicians are only people, and could just be a representative sample of humanity, each doing their best according to their ability.

I try. But it’s hard to do when the sample is so fairly representative that it appears to include the idle and the dishonest and the incompetent and the plain greedy in true proportion to their presence in the general population.

Surely there ought to be some mechanism to filter out the least attractive specimens of humanity. Or are these really the best we can come up with?

Just look at the principal players in our current farce here in Australia.

KRudd, the portentous, all knowing saviour of the nation. Actually I kept forgetting ‘portentous’ and in trying to remember came up with other ‘p’ words, such as ‘porcine’, ‘petty’, ‘presumptuous’ , even ‘pestilential’, all of which were valid but none of which encapsulated his air of smug self-satisfaction and superiority as well as ‘portentous.

It seems just possible that other people have belatedly decided that they really don’t like this attribute any more than I do.

Abbott. Well named. There is a bit of the religious freak just under the surface I think. I don’t really dislike him but it would be hard, and probably unwise, to trust him. And the sight of the repellent Ruddock lurking behind him in a recent picture reminds us that his entourage contains some without whom the world would definitely be a better place.

Back to the other side, Albanese looks and acts as if he would be more at home in a Naples back alley with a stiletto in his hand.

The independent Nick Xenephon adds some much needed colour and a degree of integrity to the Senate but his announced decision to direct his ludicrous ‘preferences’ toward the main parties and thus shore up their continuing fortunes is greatly to be regretted.

And these are the main protagonists at the Federal level. South Austalian politicians of both main persuasions are completely colourless but seem to keep their skeletons decently hidden away in the cupboard for the main part. In Victoria and New South Wales politics has become so farcical that it would fail as a sit-com due to lack of credibility. And although in Queensland and Western Australia attention does seem to be paid more toward running the state than backbiting – both between and within the major parties – there is in both States a history of school-yard triviality that is probably festering behind the scenes and liable to break out again at any moment.

I have not mentioned the puppet-masters, crawling hidden behind the scenes and manipulating the public personages to their will. But they are there, and seem to have the capability to pull the strings of both parties, regardless of their own apparent affiliations. This is shown by the rush by both Krudd and Abbott to give large sums of OUR MONEY to the management and shareholders of General Motors and Ford. This is clearly done to appease the Union movement, whose members are apparently incapable of any constructive activity beyond the assembly of motorcars. And those unfortunate members have sacrificed pay and conditions in order to swell the wallets of those heading GM and Ford. These are American companies, in case nobody has noticed, and they require OUR MONEY, and the cut-price efforts of their Australian workers, in order to MAKE A PROFIT. Well fine; that is what business is all about. But it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that if sales minus wages and overheads produces a positive figure, then no support is necessary. If it’s zero or negative then OUR MONEY will be used to fill the hole and provide a pseudo profit for the Americans.

OUR MONEY will NOT buy technology that enables these companies to operate more efficiently, so as to not only make a genuine profit whilst paying decent wages but also ro repay OUR MONEY with appropriate interest. This is obvious from the fact that the money is going to continue to be paid out indefinitely. So every Australian taxpayer will be supporting the economy of the USA for the unforeseeable future. And every Australian business will be dragged down to a level of inefficiency by the need to pour money into American wallets.

Meanwhile, we are reportedly selling our prime agricultural land to foreign companies, whilst bankrupting out own farmers and, in Victoria at least, driving them to suicide.

And the other burning issue is that of ‘boat people’. A lot of misdirected attention is caused by the blanket use of the terms ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ when applied to people who may or may not fall within those categories. A simple statement that we will do everything in our power to help and protect people whose lives are at risk through no fault of their own, but will ruthlessly eject anyone posing as a refugee simply to gain a commercial advantage by coming here, would seem appropriate.

I cannot see why there is a wish to grant people full citizenship before they have demonstrated a willingness to behave as responsible citizens. Why throw away the capacity to easily eject fakers, frauds and criminals? Issuing provisional visas that require frequent renewal would ensure that people couldn’t easily disappear into the general population until they had shown themselves fit to be accepted as citizens, and it would no longer be necessary to lock people up indefinitely whilst they awaited ‘processing’. They could be quickly released into the care of support groups, who would have to provide a bond. Support groups who ‘lost’ applicants would first lose their bond and then, if more losses occurred, their support group status. More importantly, they would have both the ability and the incentive to quickly identify and report fakes.

I don’t see any evidence of our representative sample of humanity proposing to deal with these matters. They seem to be obsessed with jeering at each other – and giving away OUR MONEY – to the exclusion of all else.

18

Sorry. Local Australian Politics creeping in again.

Oh dear; I don’t want to become partisan, none of them are worth it, but every time I turn on the TV to see if there is any news being reported – how foolish can you be – I am confronted by the unlovely features of KRudd, slavering before picked audiences of the faithful.

So in the absence of anything more stimulating or useful I will indulge in some comment on our futile and meaningless political manoeuvering.

KRudd has chosen as his most promising target the Paid Parental Leave scheme, proposed by the Liberal/National coalition, that will provide mothers with 26 weeks of paid parental leave. The amount paid will be in proportion to the mother’s wage, capped at $75,000.

Now it should be obvious to anyone that most employed women receive very low wages and therefore the majority will receive nothing like $75,000.

It should also be obvious that millionaires do not as a rule work for wages. Therefore the proportion of their wage that they are entitled to will come to zero.

So I am sick and tired of hearing KRudd banging on about how the scheme will give all women, even millionaires, $75,000. The majority of women who support KRudd’s party wil be lucky to get anything, on the pathetic wages paid to carers, nurses, cleaners, shop workers and other exploited women. But if KRudd has convinced them that they will get $75,000 under a Coalition government I can’t see why they would vote for him. As to his other point, that self-funded retirees will have to help pay for this, I am a self-funded retiree and I’m happy help working women but NOT to subsidise unprofitable car companies in order to enrich their American owners.

As an extra treat I have also been subjected to rants from Shortarse and Penny Wong. The only good thing about these is that they are so predictable and so unbelievable that it’s quite safe not to go on listening to them – as indeed is the case with KRudd. But in the seconds before the TV responds to the kill switch there are a few items that I pick up on.

Shortarse was putting across the standard Utopian vision at the National Press Club. You could have read everything that he said in a Fabian Society pamphlet from the 1920’s. About as controversial as Motherhood and Apple Pie to an American. What he didn’t say was how people who are incapable of organising the installation of roof insulation without getting other people killed were hoping to achieve these wonders in health, education, and social wellbeing.

And then Penny. True, her ability to leap from one sinking ship to another in a single bound must command our admiration. Unfortunately she has few other qualities of this magnitude. She can only drivel on in similar vein to Krudd and Shortarse.

None have explained their apparent incapability to anticipate that the resources boom could not continue forever and their failure to make any provision whatsoever to ameliorate the effects when it ended. They dissipated the large surplus that they inherited from the Coalition and, far from making provision to fund their proposed Utopian society, they have mortgaged our grandchildren’s future and already blown the proceeds on pointless and impractical schemes.

The Coalition may take no comfort from these comments – not that I expect it to see or heed them – it has yet to demonstrate that it has any better qualities or abilities.

The decision by Krudd to use OUR MONEY to give dividends to the American owners of car manufacturing companies, in order to buy ‘jobs’ for people whom they hope will vote for them is understandable. The coalition’s promise to do the same will certainly alienate many voters who object to being taxed for this purpose.

19

As you know, I try not to make smart remarks about the political woes of other countries – we can hardly claim any shining examples of integrity and worth on the Australian political scene. But recent events in the USA have been treated with considerable bias by many commentators and I thought it necessary to try and show them in a more sympathetic light. I don't say that they are right, only that they should be viewed in context and that blame for their imposition should be reserved for those whose antisocial acts give credence to acts of repression.

 

Interestingly there have always been real people determined to kill other people, steal what they have and enslave them. The 'Barbary Pirates' of the Mediterranean were robbing merchant ships , holding the rich to ransom and flogging the non-rich to convert them to Islam, whilst using them as slaves, in the time of Nelson. But that is a modern innovation. The Norsemen were robbing, pillaging and slaying (what the hell is pillaging anyway - must look it up later) in far earlier times and the Romans operated under a similar ethos.

In our own time Hitler's attitude to the 'Untermenchen' was the same. Kill them and take the
spoils for the benefit of the deserving.

You can't fight these people without getting your hands dirty. THEY make the rules. And just to complicate matters, when it comes to nation versus nation or ideology versus ideology, there are some of the same sort of people on each side.

I am not going to introduce a prescription for dealing with this. Far better people than me are trying and failing. If you kill all of the enemies without - and the huge number of non-enemies that will be
inevitably by killed in what is cosily referred to as 'collateral damage' - you will simply be confronted by the enemies within. And they will be relieved of the distraction of outward influences and so able to turn all of their violence upon you.

We keep hoping and kidding ourselves that humanity is growing up and becoming socially responsible. It's not. Some always have been; many never will be.

There was a brief hope that the Internet would have some sort of levelling and educating influence, showing people that their differences were simply cosmetic and that their best chance of the life that they wanted was to work together and settle their differences peacefully.

And who provided the Internet - created the backbone for purely MILITARY purposes and then made it available to the world? The abused, tormented, confused and assaulted USA, that's whom.

It's not the US gummint, whatever their failings and weaknesses, who have filled it with garbage and evil. And if they then choose to search it for clues that enable them to anticipate and ward off evil, why should they not do so? Yes, their own citizens, and those of other countries, will suffer abuse as a result. If detaining me in an airport under rather unpleasant conditions for a few hours is the price of preventing several thousands of citizens, of many countries, being killed and maimed - remember the World Trade Center? - I don't feel that I have cause to complain.

Loss of innocence is something that humans suffer in many ways. Scanning email is just another instance.

The sky won't fall; some religious lunatic will blow us all up into it. Whether they are sincere or only exploit it as a handy excuse, 'belief' is always involved. Belief in God; in a Nation's Destiny; in the Tooth Fairy; what does it matter? Evil will find an excuse to thrive. It's so much easier than working and the rewards are much bigger.

There are better things to fight against than the USA's attempts to defend itself, however inept its behaviour.

20

Today, contrary to my usual preference I am going to venture again into International waters. I have spent time in half of the States of the USA and met great kindness there. (And, in case you should think that this prejudices me unfairly toward Americans, I have spent time in at least 25 other countries – including Turkey, Egypt , Sri Lanka,The Yemen and Israel – and have received similar kindness in all of them.) Although I have serious misgivings about the actions of American politicians in the use of military force throughout the world, and condoning intrusion into the privacy of their own citizens, I believe that insofar as these actions are sanctioned by the American public it is only through fear and desperation. I try not to second-guess the probity or otherwise of American politicians; although the temptation is sometimes great.

Here I give the view of one American citizen and my own response.

This friend, a concerned American citizen who is by no means a committed pacifist, is troubled by acts of aggression by the USA, now and in the not too distant past. In response to my contention, in the previous blog, that the USA is not inherently evil he wrote:

….when and at what point does one become a barbarian, no better
and sometimes worse than one’s enemy.  Agreed about the very real force
that is evil as well…

My response to that, which he urged me to print in this blog, was:

Agreed. One can become worse, if sufficiently desperate. (I have just
slain my ISP. Not actually life-threatening but they eventually angered
me out of all proportion to their misdeeds.)

The point I would like to make is that the blame for evil should be laid
squarely at the feet of those whose behaviour provoked it in the first
place. If you prod a lion with a stick he may attack someone other than
you but that won’t be the lion’s fault, it will be yours.

Similarly, there seems to be no sympathy in the world’s press for the
many Egyptian policemen being murdered as they try to prevent people
from murdering each other. They were not being violent or attacking
anyone when people were going about their normal lives, only after
savage provocation, when their own lives were threatened.

The Egyptian policemen who interviewed me in Port Said when our
temporary crew member left (our sailboat) were polite, kindly and humorous.
I expect that they have all retired by now but am sickened by the
thought that others like them have been slaughtered for simply trying to
do their job.

We often see lesser instances where police are blamed because some
lunatic causes death or injury to innocent – or at least, uninvolved –
bystanders when trying to avoid arrest. The USA was fated to become the
world’s policeman whether or not it wished, simply because of its size
and power. And after enjoying the luxury of criticising the UK in that
role it is now facing the same problems on a larger scale – and making
the same mistakes. It can be greedy, incompetent and overbearing. It can
be very wrong and very stupid. But it is NOT evil. The lion is being
hurt and is lashing out blindly.

The nastiness in Egypt has been caused by the people who used democracy
only to destroy it. They should not be allowed to try and shift the
blame elsewhere. And anyone helping them to try and do so must be at
least partly responsible also. It seems strange that the US has not
unequivocally backed the military who, far from seeking to keep power
for themselves, were trying to restore democratic government as soon as
possible.

Too often diplomacy is an excuse for avoiding responsibility. Dithering
in the Balkans was responsible for thousands of deaths, as it was also
in Sri Lanka. In both cases, strict and decisive action as soon as the
initial terrorism occurred could have protected thousands of innocent
people. Will everyone now stand back and see Egypt torn apart? Just like
Syria? We shall see.

21

We are all pretty used to the concept of a ‘Conscience Vote’; so much so that we never pause to consider the implications of the concept. At least, I didn’t and I doubt if many other people have either. Yet when you do stop to consider it the implications are profound.

If you are as old as me you will have read ‘Pinochio’ as a child. If you are younger you may well remember the Disney version, with the catchy tune ‘Give a Little Whistle’. In either case, you are probably familiar with the line ‘And always let your conscience be your guide’.

The key word here is ‘Always’. Not ‘Sometimes’. Not ‘When it doesn’t interfere with political expediency’. Not ‘Just when it poses no risk to yourself’. Always!

The implication is that you always support what you believe to be right. That’s what ‘conscientious’ means; doing the right thing to the best of your ability. Always! Not just when your political masters graciously permit it.

Now isn’t that interesting! Do you want YOUR elected representatives to be conscientious?

Do you want the people who you elected to govern your country or your state to vote AGAINST what they deeply believe to be right, whenever other members of their party want them to?

Let’s try another sentence:

NEVER let your conscience be your guide unless there is a specific ‘Conscience Vote’.

Doesn’t sound really good, does it? But that’s the system that we have. No doubt there are many instances when voting according to the party line is what conscience dictates anyway. One would hope so.

So perhaps it would change nothing if the normal practise was for elected representatives to vote according to their consciences and for the parties to declare a ‘No Conscience Vote’ whenever they wanted to ensure that all of their members voted according to the party line.

It won’t happen of course. A real shame; I would love to see a party leader standing up and declaring “We are going to impose a ‘No Conscience’ vote on this motion” And when we saw it happening time after time perhaps we would at last realise what a farce the concept of individuals representing their electorates is. And would draw attention to how far the party leaders believed that their chosen course of action might offend the consciences of a significant number of their members.

Of course there are plenty of unthinking people who only vote for a label anyway. That is borne out by the way in which opinion polls fluctuate week by week. If there is a person whom you think would make a good Representative for your constituency why would your opinion of that person rise and fall according to the reported antics of some party leader? Conversely, why would you be prepared to vote for that person despite the fact that he or she appeared to be in some way dishonest or deviant? But they do, don’t they.

There is no debate in Parliaments or their equivalent bodies. Each party member – if he attends the reading of a bill at all – excoriates the views of the opposition and lauds the claims of his own party. No impassioned justification ever dents the impervious shell of party belief. No calmly considered criticism ever moves the opponents to reconsider the virtues of their stance. Claims are made; invective is hurled; and the outcome, having been decided far in advance, is unaffected by anything that is said. It is, said Churchill, the best system that we have been able to come up with. Well over half a century later we have not only failed to improve on it, we have reduced it to a farce.

22

I have commented on the paucity of debate in our political institutions – and the substitution of mindless invective in its place; a process which has advanced to near perfection here in Australia.

The natural corollary to this is abandonment of any pretence of debate or discussion in favour of rubber stamp approval of the will of the majority, unclouded by any alternative view. It seems though that the rituals must still be performed, if only to lull the gullible into unconditional acceptance of the unpalatable reality.

The following words are not mine, although I have made some slight alterations so as to show them applicable to the general case, rather than restricted to the body to which they originally referred.

‘Except for the few minutes it takes to vote, my colleagues and I don’t spend much time on the floor. Most decisions, about what bills to call and when to call them, about how amendments will be handled and how uncooperative members will be made to cooperate, will have been worked out well in advance by the majority leader, the relevant committee chairman, their staffs, and (depending on the degree of controversy involved, and the magnanimity of the opposition member handling the bill) their counterparts on this side.

By the time we reach the floor and the clerk starts calling the roll, each of the members will have determined – in consultation with his or her staff, caucus leader, preferred lobbyists, interest groups, constituent mail, and ideological leanings – just how to position him or herself on the issue.’

(Note that conscience is not consulted here.)

‘It makes for an efficient process, which is much appreciated by the members, who are juggling 12 or 13 hour schedules and want to get back to their offices to meet constituents or return phone calls, or to a nearby hotel to cultivate donors, or to a television studio for a live interview.

If you stick around though, you may see one lone member standing at his desk after the others have left, seeking recognition to deliver a statement on the floor. It may be an explanation of a bill he’s introducing, or it may be a broader commentary on some unmet national challenge. The speaker’s voice may flare with passion; his arguments – about cuts to programs for the poor or obstructionism on judicial appointments, or the need for energy independence – may be soundly constructed. But the speaker will be addressing a near-empty chamber; just the presiding officer, a few staffers, the official reporter and the unblinking eye of the TV camera. The proposer will finish and the statement will be gathered for the official record. Another member may enter as the first departs; stand at her desk, seek recognition, and deliver her statement in the same ritual manner.

In one of the world’s greatest deliberative chambers, no one is listening.’

These words, originally written by Barack Obama in reference to the United States Senate, sum up perfectly the farcical performance that is enacted daily by what are supposedly deliberative gatherings the world over. The pathos of the last line is appropriate to the obituary for the concept of discussion, debate, and above all willingness to listen receptively and learn. To use the argot of the ’60s, Backroom deals rule OK.

The simple fact is that the legislative process overwhelms the legislators for one simple reason only:

THERE IS TOO MUCH LEGISLATION AND TOO LITTLE DEBATE

Contrary to widely held belief, the gummint ought NOT to do anything about most things and there ought NOT to be a Laura Ginnit. Furthermore, ALL legislation should lapse after a period of 10 years at most; preferably five. This should help to ensure that there is no time to keep reviving unnecessary restrictions on the populace and concentrate the minds of their elected representatives on the few issues worthy of their attention. Perhaps then we might see the culture of discussion, cooperation and compromise that produces worthwhile and sustainable results.

23

In the aftermath of yet another underwhelming election, I find that I have a number of reactions, which I would like to sort into some kind of order. Perhaps writing about them will help me to work through them and clarify my own thoughts and conclusions. In no particular order then:

1.Possible (but surely unlikely) resignation of KRudd from the leadership of the Australian Labor Party..

2.Probable (but regrettable) elevation (if that is the correct term for ‘scrabble to top of muck heap’) of B Shortarse.

3.Unsurprising dismay of the entire political cabal at the probable election of a number of Senators, and possibly a Representative or two, who are not of their number.

So:

1. KRudd has allegedly declared ‘No further leadership ambitions’. Is there not a distinct echo here? Surely this was said not a million years before trampling Julia Gillard into the mud. If he’d said ‘I’ll cut her bloody throat the minute I see a chance’ one could sympathise with his anger and even cheer at his success. But he didn’t. In the best political crawler tradition he swore to support her whilst scheming to elbow her aside. I must admit I’ve never liked either of his faces.

Maybe it is just parochialism that stopped the Queensland dominated Labor party from studying what happened in South Australia when a Liberal party given a crushing majority by the electorate responded by dumping the premier who led them to victory and replacing him with a person who effectively bankrupted the State in record time, before sinking in a mire of dishonesty and deceit. Had they thought about that, they might have been less inclined to play leadership games. Unsurprisingly SA still has a Labor administration. People have long memories. Looking on the bright side, perhaps the Coalition will enjoy a similar longevity at Federal level. I can’t say that I like them; I just don’t have the deep-seated loathing of them that their predecessors earned.

1. If reports are to be believed, B Shortarse was principally responsible for wrecking the careers of not one but two Prime Ministers, from his own party. Is this a distinction? Cause for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records mayhap? Even in the dysfunctional world of Australian politics I don’t believe this to have been a common occurrence. Not at Federal level anyway. There does seem to have been an unseemly turnover of State Premiers in Victoria and NSW in recent years but which have been activated by whom is something I have never studied closely. The whole circus seems too trivial to justify the effort. Indeed, the whole idea of dividing the country – which has a population barely adequate for a major capital city elsewhere in the world – into piddling little States has always seemed to me bizarre. Or, rather, retaining this now idiotic structure – I can understand that it was perhaps appropriate in a time of negligible transport and extremely slow communication.

   Getting back to the point, B Shortarse has declared that he is undecided whether to take on the leadership (without the courtesy of waiting until it has been vacated). By the normal standards of his party I understand this to mean that he will grab at it with both hands and cling to it like a leech. Probably appropriate. In fact since I wrote that he has apparently declared his ‘willingness’ to accept the task. There is a certain nauseating inevitability about his progress. In the Union movement, rushing to the top on a sea of upturned faces of the members is, I suppose, regarded as normal career progression. Rushing to the top of politics over the upturned faces of Prime Ministers seems more in tune with the precepts of Machiavelli and the Borgias.

2. Fascinating how the slightest movement toward real democracy – which, for the benefit of anyone who does not already know, consists of actual participation in the processes of governance by ALL citizens – causes shrieks of alarm from politicians of all persuasions. And well it might. If we can inject enough normal people into the Houses of Parliament we might be able to start undoing years of lawyerly obfuscation and mindless regulation and begin to apply standards of honesty in our everyday lives. Even Nick Xenophon, who ought to know better, has joined in the chorus railing against non-politicians gaining seats. True, it has come about by a happy accident. We are told – and would the Establishment lie to us? – that the intention of the people behind many of the parties listed on the Senate voting papers was to direct preferences to one or other main candidate, not to get their named candidate elected. Well I have already given my opinion of the bloody stupid preferences system that nobody really understands. There is no way that I want any fraction of my vote given to anyone that I don’t specifically choose and I can see absolutely no justification for a system which permits that to happen; even though it is apparently the cause of a pleasing outcome this time.

   Tony Abbott won unexpected support from me when he stated that the money that the government disburses is OUR money; and dear old ‘Honest Joe’ Hockey also pointed out that the only money the government has is that which it collects in taxes upon US. Excellent. Then Tony blew away all the goodwill by repeating that old mantra ‘Don’t vote for a minor party or an independent’. Well why, may one ask, are they allowed on the ballot paper then? And what right has Tony Abbott to direct us how to vote? There is a genuine cause for concern when a few independents can play off both sides of parliament in order to push their own – often bizarre – agenda or, worse, prop up a thoroughly disliked and discredited government. Or when, as happened in Tasmania, a minor party acts to put into power a party that obtained less votes than its main opponent, despite having campaigned on a promise to support the party gaining the majority of votes. But this ignores the prospect of putting so many uncommitted people into both houses that NO legislation can pass unless it is approved by a majority of people with no party axe to grind.

   We know that the lawyer-ridden ranks of career politicians are obsessed with the introduction of ever-increasing regulations, of such byzantine complexity that they require an army of well paid, non-productive people to impose them and create a flood of wealth for the lawyers of those people brave enough to contest them. And for the government-employed army of lawyers retained to defeat any such attempts, of course. Just suppose we could stop them from dong that. And then introduce a bill making all regulations void after 5 years. NO more pointless interference with our lives and every member of parliament focused on the few subjects that a majority of normal people agree to be necessary. And a horde of lawyers forced to consider taking up some constructive occupation. We can expect to see a concerted effort by the main parties to see that doesn’t happen. It is time for a concerted effort by us to see that it does.

Summary.

We have seen two Prime Ministers, each confirmed by the electorate in a general election, driven from office by Party backroom plotting led by a Poison Dwarf.

We have seen the electorate’s justifiable anger, at the behaviour of the limited choices from whom they are expected to select people to represent them, reflected in the support of numerous people who are not part of the cosy club of professional politicians.

We have seen the professional politicians hastily unite to oppose any tendency toward actual democratic representation.

Roll on the next election.

24

This is a sorry tale of greed and stupidity but, surprisingly, it is not about politicians.

It doesn’t really belong in this blog but I hope that a bit of light relief from endless comment about politicians and lawyers is acceptable. (Oh dear! Lawyers do get a mention.)

The story begins when our long term Internet Service Supplier (ISP) was bought by another company. Mild deterioration set in at once; tampering with the billing cycle and getting rid of the competent and efficient, Brisbane-based Support team, replacing them with barely coherent, excuse providers based on some mid-Pacific atoll. They also replaced the very good email client with a difficult to use, ‘free’ version, lacking the most useful features of the previous one, such as the ability to filter out junk mail.

Then we received a phone call, suggesting that we might care to contract for a bundled phone/ADSL2+ service, at no greater cost than our current arrangement. The full price was spelt out clearly, together with the promise of ADSL2+ speeds and the costs of the various types of phone call. We agreed to that. This was a failure of due diligence on our part and you may well conclude that everything that followed was our own fault. I won’t disagree with that.

We didn’t notice any great improvement in speed over our previous plain old ADSL but we don’t play war games on the Internet and there are a lot of reasons why some downloads might be no faster, so we didn’t really think about it. Bills continued to be paid automatically from my Visa account, as they had been for the previous 10 years, and I only scanned them casually, mostly to see which phone calls looked expensive. So it wasn’t until 9 months after we had signed up for the service that I noticed an item ‘Account Keeping Charges’ had appeared on the bill. This comprised a fixed charge plus a percentage for use of Visa. It was only a few dollars but it certainly wasn’t something we’d agreed to, so I sent off an email protesting about it. But then I thought to check back and found that this charge had been applied in a rather erratic manner over the preceding 5 months; sometimes only the fixed charge, sometimes the percentage as well, sometimes neither. I emailed again. I received automatic acknowledgement of my emails but never any reply. There were a couple of muddled phone calls that I could make no sense of, so I asked for email communication only. That stopped the phone calls but no emails came, except one that had as an attachment a brochure (dated 7 months after the start of the contract) that listed the disputed charges. I began to get annoyed and contacted the Australian Consumer and Competition Council (ACCC) and the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). (Well, if we are going to pay for hordes of lawyers out of OUR MONEY we might as well try and get some value for it.) I knew that the ACCC had successfully prosecuted an ISP for no greater sin than advertising (correctly) the cost of their service but failing to mention that there was a set-up fee – which didn’t seem to me to warrant the heavy fine that was imposed. So I thought that an ISP helping themselves to money without any agreement was surely a greater reason to prosecute than their omitting to mention something on the back of a bus. Not so, it seems; which just confirms my already low opinion of the workings of the legal system.

The TIO requires that anyone with a complaint should first contact their ISP to try and resolve it. Well I’d done that, so they began to investigate. This resulted in a renewal of fractured phone calls from the ISP, but from a person who denied all knowledge of my emails. This was curious, as the company only provides one contact email address for complaints. It seemed to me that they were now fudging matters in earnest.

At this point the new owners decided to subsume our original supplier completely into their own organisation. On the website where this information was conveyed there was also a paragraph pointing out that when there is a change of service provider the customer has the right to terminate an existing contract. This seemed to me to be a quick way to cut our losses so I emailed the ISP, quoting their own words and asking to terminate the contract. And that should have been that. I would have paid my outstanding bill – less all of the unauthorised charges – and walked away. But then, and only then, I did what I ought to have done when they first offered the contract; I started looking at other suppliers’ offerings.

I quickly discovered that there was an Internet site that listed the companies that had equipment capable of delivering ADSL2+ located in the various exchanges cross the country. There were also a number of suppliers with advertisements linked to the page giving this information about my local exchange. My ISP was NOT among them, nor did their name appear among those listed as having the appropriate equipment installed. And, most interesting of all, the ISP’s who did have the necessary capability were all offering a better service for about two-thirds of the amount that we were paying.

I emailed our ISP asking them to confirm that they did actually have the equipment installed and had been providing the service that we had been charged for. I made no accusation; all they had to do was say ‘yes’. But they didn’t. By now I was getting really irritated, so I passed on this latest information to both the TIO and the ACCC. The ACCC simply acknowledged the information without comment but the TIO phoned me and we had some discussion of what might be appropriate if, in fact, the service had not been supplied as contracted. I didn’t want to be harsh or vindictive – in fact I would simply have liked the common courtesy of a reply to my emails – but the TIO must have really sunk their teeth into the ISP. They obtained a final resolution that all outstanding charges should be dropped and the contract terminated without penalty.

So what does it all amount to? For the sake of grabbing about $20, and maybe another $60 to come, the ISP has lost the remaining revenue from the contract – about $1,200 – plus an amount due of about $175. And of course they have lost a customer. If they had simply apologised; perhaps asked me to use another method of payment and dropped the fixed charge for the duration of the contract we might even have renewed the service; particularly if they had by then lifted their game and employed a support team capable of intelligent (and intelligible) response to queries.

Of course our new ISP changed our phone number with no warning and then informed us that it would take 10 to 14 days to connect the new Internet service but nobody’s perfect. They did it in 11 days and the Internet is a damn sight faster now! They carefully made us aware of ALL of their charges well in advance, they are responsive and intelligible on the phone and their automated system for setup was very fast and easy to use. Please God don’t let them be bought up by the Turkeys that we’ve just got rid of.

 

 

 

25

 

Back to politics again folks.

While the Poison Dwarf and Mafia Man are fighting it out for control of the losers, and the winners are being criticised for not dumping skill and experience to make way for a random selection of women, there is much hot air being expended on the electorate’s choice of senators. Apparently none of the politicians or media persons voicing their opinions on radio and TV are capable of realising that we don’t slog through the task of ranking 73 – or in other States 110, I believe – candidates unless we have some purpose in doing so.

Our purpose, no matter what eventual result the screwy and unpredictable ‘preferential’ system regurgitates, is to insert some plain old common sense and consideration of OUR interests into the political circus.

Apparently the Sex Party did well.

Yes, and I voted for them in South Australia too – after the Euthanasia party.

I actually care that people suffering agonising and incurable illnesses may choose to end their suffering if they wish. And I would be very pleased if those people who are happy to prolong that suffering in order to appease their own consciences were afflicted with similar agonies – failing which they ought at least to lose the privilege of sitting in parliament.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Sex Party supports voluntary euthanasia too.

There has been a lot of squawking by politicians of all persuasions about how silly it is that these sorts of people are likely to get senate seats; it is somehow beyond their understanding that we WANT these people elected. not so much because of their stated aims but because ANYBODY is likely to be an improvement on the choices that we are presented with by the conventional parties.

We have the Loony Spendthrift Fairy Godmother party (AKA Labor), the Greedy, Screw Everyone party (AKA Liberal/National Coalition) and the Prop up the Loony Spendthrifts and Dabble Mindlessly in International Politics party (AKA Greens). Absolutely ANYBODY has to be a better

choice than any of those. My one regret is that only Clive Palmer looks likely to get a seat in the Lower House, and still that is in the balance. At least Clive, even on his own, is capable of creating some havoc among the establishment. It’s a start.

The idea that legislation should be subjected to the scrutiny of normal, rational beings really delights me. With any luck they will stall the entire process. Then we can move on to clearing out the mass of verbal diarrhoea that is the current legislation. Let’s hear it for the non-lawyers –

Hip hip, Hoooorayyyy

26

The trivia of domestic politics continue to de-liven the news – and if that’s not the opposite of enliven it ought to be and I so declare it. And of course we have the interminable ‘sport’, which has very little to do with any sort of contest and much to do with the private affairs of players, clubs, managers, and anyone else who can by any stretch of the imagination be said to have some connection, however tenuous, with ‘sport’. Perhaps they put that on so that the utterances of politicians and political commentators are not the most tedious things offered to us. But it is, to quote the Duke of Wellington, after Waterloo, ‘A damned close-run thing’.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, there is mass killing. Is this worse than the killing in Syria? Or, once again, in the USA? How true it is that the only counter to a ‘Bad guy with a gun’ is a ‘Good guy with a gun’. And how true also that the good guy can seldom be there in time and can never act until the killing has begun. So the good guy can never eliminate the harm, only hope to bring it to an end with as few deaths and injuries as possible. The only effective course is keeping guns away from bad guys – not easy when a whole economy rests on the production and sale of a continuous outpouring of weapons of all types. And if the bad guy has Sarin instead?

‘Lunatic’ has become an unfashionable word. Insofar as it was applied unfeelingly and arbitrarily to people suffering from a whole range of mental illnesses, that is a good thing. However, as an epithet for the sort of person who thinks it justifiable to randomly take life or, worse, to brainwash, train, and send others to do so, I think it is ideal.

‘Terrorist’ has a sort of shoddy glamour to it, in fact in the eyes of many of those who practise it no doubt it has real glamour – although the cynical and self-serving creatures who organise and control these acts it is just a means of gaining power. If we consider sanity to be a necessary foundation for peaceful co-existence between people then it obviously is something that terrorists don’t have. And nor do people who randomly gun down children, workers, or any other group of people, because of some real or imagined slight. Let’s get rid of the grandiose title and call then all what they are.

They are all one. Lunatics. People who lack the essential sanity to get along and occupy themselves constructively. People who set fire to churches and gun down congregations, people who run amok in shopping malls – or schools, or workplaces. Never mind their imagined motives or self-justifications, their pseudo military organisations or religious pretensions. They are all simply lunatics and should be referred to as such and only that. We may be unable to prevent the killing but we don’t have to stroke their egos every time as well. And we can make it quite clear that we are not fooled into thinking that there is any legitimacy in their actions. Their only proper place in the scheme of things is an institution for the criminally insane.

There seems to be a convention that if enough people are engaged in an activity they can’t all be insane. I disagree. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that people who are devoid of one essential human capacity are incapable of plotting, organising, and managing mass activities, causing death and injury. There is, however, every reason to understand that attempting to reason with them or reach some accommodation must fail. You can’t make them sane by offering concessions. They are lunatics. Understand that they are lunatics. Call them lunatics and treat them as lunatics. No fancy names, no references to founders or leaders names. Lunatics.

Lunatics have attacked people in a shopping mall in Kenya. Lunatics have taken hostages in the Philippines. Lunatics have attacked the congregation of a church in Pakistan. Lunatics attacked the runners in the Boston marathon. A lunatic ran amok in a Washington navy yard. Lunatics have detonated more car bombs in Bagdhad. Let them see that and only that on the media, world-wide. It won’t stop them but it won’t give them star billing either.

And it won’t encourage them to hope that their actions may gain them whatever power they are seeking.

27

Getting back to the purpose of this blog, how do we get away from the present vogue in ‘government’ (usually, though wrongly, prefixed by ‘democratic’) which consists of alternate manipulation by two opposing parties, each solely concerned with benefiting its supporters at the expense of everyone else? Well of course the main motivation is really the desire for personal aggrandisement and the bonus of freeloading on the rest of the population during retirement but in order to achieve these noble objectives it is necessary to attract a notional majority of support, by promising gifts that are recognised as bounty by those whose votes are being sought..

A real worry is the way in which election results are apparently swayed significantly by the promises hastily made by the candidates during the few weeks prior to the election date. Is it possible that so few people are influenced by the earlier behaviour of politicians, whether in government or in opposition? Or by so-called independents, who rarely act independently and are often simply major party members in disguise? Even if these sudden (and usually unfunded) prospects of a brave new world seem attractive, whatever makes anyone think that they will be kept by people with a record of broken promises stretching back through many generations?

I don’t have that bad an opinion of my fellow citizens. I suspect that they accept that any realistic form of representation is just not going to happen, so they vote according to those promises that would benefit them if they were fulfilled, some of which just might be met, even in shrunken form. After all, cynicism is the main product of our current electoral methods.

A difficult bar to improvement is the vested interest that the present regime – whatever the flavour of the month – has in perpetuating the existing system. Forcible attendance at the polls and the lunatic ‘proportional representation’ are designed to give the illusion that candidates selected by the parties with the most money to spend are actually chosen – preferred even – by the electorate. Yet it is obvious that most of the population are of the opinion that none of them are worth the trip to the polling station, else compulsion would be redundant.

It is a well-known canard that if individual views were reflected in the decisions of Parliament very little legislation would be passed. And there is strong propaganda alleging that this is a ‘Bad Thing’.

But it isn’t – except for those people whose nature is to want to interfere in every aspect of others’ activities. I have said it before and I will no doubt say it again many times ‘Less legislation is a Good Thing!’ Legislation not only interferes grossly with our freedom to live as we wish, whilst respecting the wishes of others (there are no ‘Rights’ except those that we declare ourselves) it also provides the lawyer classes with material for endless obfuscation and wastefulness. Simple situations that could be resolved by answering yes or no to two questions:

Was it yours?

Did you have permission to take it?

are blown up into three-ring circuses at enormous public expense by the arguing talents of lawyers over piddling interpretations of minor detail and the connivance of a court system that is controlled by seconded lawyers. (There is probably a very good argument for elected judges who would be disqualified from standing if they had been trained as lawyers but I won’t develop that here.)

This seems an appropriate point to introduce one of my favourite concepts, that of saying ‘What good will it do?’ AND ‘What harm may it do?’ These estimates should be clearly incorporated every bit of legislation that is passed, together with the exact purpose of the legislation. Efforts by police and the courts to impose meanings and purposes on legislation other than those explicitly stated in the legislation should never be permitted and decisions and sentences imposed by the courts should always be supported by answers to those same two questions.

Singling out one individual for excessive punishment ‘As a lesson to others contemplating the same actions’ is abhorrent; as also is singling out an individual for punishment for an offence that no-one realised was an offence prior to that time. These are only the more obvious among many examples of injustice routinely met within our legal system, a system very much on a par with our electoral system. Both are held up as exemplars of good practice; both are seriously flawed and exist not by the nature of any virtue that they possess but by the determined efforts of entrenched privilege that controls all efforts to achieve a better system.

The problem for anyone who wants to be an individual rather than a herd member is that individuals cannot, by definition, combine. Therefore any group prepared to act as a herd can drive out individuals by force. But just suppose that there are many more individuals than herd members. Sheer stubbornness may then exhaust the herd in its efforts to force the individuals to conform. Please create your own blog and make your own flank attacks on the herd; it is the only way I can think of to make our voices heard above their clamour.

28

Now that we have succeeded, against all the odds, in injecting into the senate some people who were not preselected by any of the established political parties, there has been a predictable outcry from those parties to the effect that ‘it din orter be allowed’.

Well why not? ‘Ooh these people might be just anybody. We don’t know how they might vote.’

Damn right you don’t. Nor should you. Parliament is supposed to be a debating chamber – well alright, two chambers – where you persuade people to vote for your proposition by reasoned argument and the presentation of well researched and accurate data. And if you want these new people to support you that is just what you’ll have to do, I hope. Not make shonky deals behind closed doors. Stand up where everybody can see and hear you and convince them that you are right. And perhaps, God forbid, listen to them and allow yourself to be sometimes persuaded that you are wrong. That would be a first for democracy wouldn’t it.

‘But they don’t have any political background.’

I don’t know anything about their background. I do know, however, that whereas my Electrician and my Plumber must be qualified and licensed, YOU, Mr or Ms politician are not required to have any formal qualifications whatsoever. Now I, despite half a lifetime doing my own plumbing and electrical installation in the UK, where such things were lawful, and despite having been Chief Test and Inspection Engineer for a transformer manufacturer, daily operating a test bench capable of delivering 1000 amps and an insulation test bay operating in excess of 400,000 volts, am not allowed in Australia to wire up a light fitting. So why am I ‘represented’ at both State and Federal level by people who do not have Certificate 4 in Political Studies and a licence to practise politics?

The truth is, I don’t mind! I WANT to be able to choose ANYONE to represent me and I don’t want to give any ammunition to their opponents that could result in their exclusion.

The one dubious virtue of the uproar is that some politicians are questioning the utility of the obscure and byzantine ‘proportional representation system’. It is ironic that they have only chosen to question it because it has for once caused a proportion of the electorate who are normally excluded from any representation of their choice to be able to elect – or have elected by others – a few people more to their liking.

As I have said elsewhere, if you want representation in proportion to the number of people making a choice, simply declare anyone who obtains 25% or more of the overall vote (not of the votes cast but of the potential vote for the electorate) elected. And compel nobody to vote. You are very unlikely to get more than two members elected but you will probably get two differing points of view represented. All politicians, and governments, claim that they act for all Australians but of course they don’t. They act for their supporters and to hell with anyone else.

There is an implied belief that serious, adult behaviour by politicians in Parliament is unacceptable to the electorate, who expect something between a gladiatorial contest and a display of infantile tantrums by those representing them. This is unquestionably true of some; perhaps of many. If, however, it represents the view of the majority of electors, perhaps the method of selection is irrelevant; as indeed are the proceedings of Parliament in that case.

29

Another failure to keep up the blog. I am behind with a lot of things and have to pick which to attack next. Also I have been reading up Scott and Shackleton’s expeditions to the Antarctic. The pettiness of our politicians and other would-be masters is quite nauseating enough in itself; by comparison with these giants of willpower and self-sacrifice they are down in the primeval slime. Yet I despair of any of my efforts resulting in their replacement by people of actual worth.

So I have been thinking about the basics of law and politics. It seems a bit like Bertrand Russell’s use of symbolic logic to prove that 1 + 1 = 2, although come to think of it I could probably write a more interesting blog about that. But here goes anyway.

Given any group of people, one will probably be physically dominant. If not, the two or more who are contenders for that position will fight until one emerges as the winner. If they are too evenly matched for that, in the combination of strength, cunning and viciousness, domination of the group will likely pass between them over time, until some are weeded out by sickness, old age, or death.

If they are fairly benign, whether a single one or a number of contenders, the remainder of the group will do their bidding and make sacrifices for their comfort without significant protest. But if they are not, and the group feels that they are carrying a burden and suffering indignities and unfairness, some members will band together to devise a scheme limiting the powers of the dominant by using their own superior numbers.

Historically, in English-speaking countries, this concept reached its peak in the signing of the Magna Carta; the significance of which is so great that it is appreciated in most civilised countries – even though the current English governments seem hell bent on destroying the fundamental liberties that have stemmed from it.

Just how a document that simply restricted the power of a king over some barons came to be synonymous with justice for all is a miracle in itself. The fact that it remained so for hundreds of years is extraordinary. That the population of England is prepared to see the protections built upon it it torn down by cheapskate politicians in a matter of years is far more alarming than the fact that the politicians thought of doing so in the first place.

It remains true that we have politicians and all the paraphernalia of elections, plus lawyers and all the paraphernalia of law courts, simply so that we can’t be bullied by the physically strongest among us into doing whatever benefits them, regardless or our own wellbeing.

Instead, we are bullied by the sly and slimy, the elected politicians and the so-called ‘public servants’, who are their instruments, into doing whatever suits them, in return for the occasional sop to our own lives.

We have no real power to change them. I would probably never vote for Pauline Hanson but the fact that her political enemies were able to conspire and distort the law to the extent of getting her gaoled and, more importantly, that not one of those responsible was held to account for their behaviour even after the conviction was overturned, clearly illustrates that no challenger to the status quo will be tolerated by the major parties. Their frenzied reaction to our getting a few of our own kind into the Senate recently, and their indecent rush to change the rules to prevent us from doing it again, underlines this point.

It would be nice to frame a constitution primarily intended to protect the rights of the individual citizen to free speech, free choice of political representation, and freedom from interference in his or her private life. Let’s try…

Constitution of Australia

Purpose:

The purpose of this document is to provide a legally binding framework that constrains all levels of government in Australia to governing – as distinct from ruling.

Governing requires the minimum interference with the individual citizen consistent with the preservation of civil order and the defence of the country and its allies.

This constitution also determines certain legal constraints that are needed to restrain inconsistencies, excesses, irrationalities and simple dishonesty that are endemic to the linked practices of law and government.

Restrictions:

No part of this constitution may be changed or removed, nor anything added to it unless:

• requested in a petition carrying the signatures of 10,000 registered voters, and
• endorsed by a referendum of all registered voters.

 

Australian Governments shall make no law that is not:

• immediately comprehensible to an ordinary citizen, and
• based upon honesty and fairness

nor any that:

• restricts the right of every full citizen of Australia to assemble peacefully and to express their personal views in speech or writing at any time

except that:

• violence and incitement to violence shall be criminal offences

 

To become law a measure must be approved by at least two thirds of the elected body proposing it and it shall lapse automatically after an 8-year period unless revalidated by at least two thirds of the elected body.

No regulation shall be introduced to circumvent the failure of a Bill to win approval or revalidation.

Every Bill must be preceded by a Statement of Intent and every action taken under that Bill must comply with the Statement of Intent.

Each Statement of Intent, and each application of the law, must address the questions:

What good will this do? And

What harm may it do?

No person who has technically transgressed the law when circumstances require that they do so in order to prevent harm shall be penalised under law.

All laws shall be applied fairly. There shall be no ‘setting an example’ by penalising one offender more than another for the same offence.

A prison sentence shall be mandatory in all convictions for physical assault.

No person shall be committed to prison except those who have committed a deliberate physical assault.

The law shall not be debased by use as a tax collecting mechanism.

Punishments for offences other than physical assault shall involve inconvenience. Home detention, reporting frequently to police, public humiliation, physical hardship ( such as route marches in desert conditions) and, in the case of serious financial misbehaviour, Reduction to Penury (whereby the offender is required to subsist permanently on an income no greater than the age pension and any person attempting to relieve that situation shall be subject to the same penalty) shall apply.

If fines are considered unavoidable they shall ALWAYS be a fixed percentage of the convicted person’s DISPOSABLE income and shall only apply where that income is significant.

Income from fines shall go IN ITS ENTIRETY to compensate the victims of crime.

The penalty (other than Reduction to Penury) for transgressing ANY law shall double for each repeat offence.

 

Definitions

Head of State

The Australian Head of State shall be chosen by a referendum of all registered voters and shall hold office until retirement, at age 70.

Parliament

There shall be a National Parliament elected by a poll of all registered voters. The elected members shall retain their seats for seven years. They may then stand for election, once, for a further seven years. They shall be paid a salary equivalent to the average basic remuneration of middle managers in industry and be entitled to superannuation on the same terms as all other employed persons. They shall receive no other remuneration at any time. They shall elect a Prime Minister and a Speaker from among their number by simple majority and the Prime Minister shall form a government and appoint appropriate Ministers. The Speaker shall not have any affiliation to any political party during his or her term of office.

Other levels of government

The subsidiary levels of government, their electorates and their powers shall be as determined from time to time by the National government. In defining those powers the national government shall apply to each the test ‘What good will it do’ and ‘What harm may it do’ and shall make freely available to ALL citizens its answers to those questions and its justification of those answers.

Electorate

The population shall be divided into national electorates of approximately equal size, corresponding to defined contiguous geographic regions. The method of election defined herein will generally result in the election of two candidates per electorate. Each electorate shall contain approximately 200,000 registered voters and boundaries shall be adjusted between elections to maintain this density as far as practicable.

Elections

Governments at all levels shall reflect as far as practicable the diverse views of the citizens, so to be effective they must strive to achieve a balance of requirements.

Any person who meets the criteria for a registered voter and can show evidence of completing a serious study of political history may, if supported by a petition carrying the signatures of 1000 registered voters, stand as a candidate for any elective office. There shall be no other method of selection.

Any candidate who secures 25% or more of the available vote shall be declared elected, where the available vote is equal to the number of voters registered to vote in that particular election.

Voters may consider more than one candidate to be acceptable and may therefore vote positively for as many as are thought suitable. If a voter considers one or more of the candidates unfit to hold office he or she may cast a negative vote for each such candidate. A candidate’s total vote shall be the sum of the positive and negative votes received by that candidate.

(There is no reason why the total votes cast should not exceed the available figure, nor need a specific number of candidates elected. The numbers will soon settle down to an approximate level and result usually in the election of two candidates in each electorate, each from a different part of the political spectrum.)

Qualifications:

Citizen:

A Full Australian Citizen shall be a person who was:

Born in Australia or

Has been granted Australian Citizenship and has spent a minimum of 10 years physically resident in Australia with no criminal convictions, and

Has not taken part in demonstrations or warlike or terrorist activities against Australia or any country with whom Australia is not at war.

Registered voter:

A registered voter shall be any Full Australian Citizen who is:

• 18 years of age or over,
• not insane,
• not under punishment for physical assault.

Candidate for Head of State:

Candidates for the position of Head of State shall be registered voters. They shall NOT be members of any political party nor support nor endorse any such party or members of such a party.

Candidate for any level of government:

A candidate for Parliament or any lesser body of government shall:

Show proof of a serious study of politics and administration (eg. Degree or TAFE course results) appropriate to the level of government for which he or she is standing.

Have been resident in the area that they represent for not less than five years and guarantee to remain so during their entire period in office.

Present a petition signed by a minimum of 1000 registered voters in the relevant electorate.

Not be under sentence for criminal activity.

Please remember that this is a work in progress. Your comments and improvements would be most welcome. Of course it isn’t easy to write a constitution – that’s obvious from the ones that exist. And having written it there is the necessity of ensuring that it is complied with. And that doesn’t happen in a lot of countries that have constitutions. And where one exists and is mostly complied with there is always the usual gang of lawyers trying to wriggle around it.

The key to me is Government, not Ruling, closely followed by Equity and Justice, not ‘Letter of the Law’ or favours under the Old Pals Act. The power to challenge flawed legal decisions – and eject from the system those responsible for making them – may be of even greater importance than establishing a sensible electoral system.

The work continues…

 

30

This stuff I write is all very well but hardly original thought. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in ‘A History of Western Philosophy’, Marcus Aurelius, in his ‘Meditations’, favoured ‘A polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed’. Which is pretty damn much what I have been advocating.

Well it didn’t work out in ancient Rome, where, at that time at least, the Emperor had considerable power to impose his ideas. So it’s going to be an uphill job now. And the Roman army later developed a habit of popping off the Emperor in order to ensure that the new one saw to their pecuniary interests – before he in turn was popped off to encourage his successor. And while they were too busy doing that to watch their backs, the barbarians got uppity and put paid to the Roman empire.

Seems it’s a good idea to keep the military fully occupied with foreign invasions and suchlike – and probably enriching themselves therefrom, so that they are too busy to interfere in the politics of their own country. That scheme is not so socially acceptable now so our politicians are on shaky ground, whether they realise it or not. Looking at Egypt it seems that it’s just as well sometimes too. Our scheme for democracy is very vulnerable to attack by loonies organised into large groups. When the sane are (inevitably it seems) in the minority, the outcome of universal franchise must be to destroy choice. And we can’t always rely on the military to be on the side of freedom.

I’m not sure where that line of thought is leading to, so I’ll leave it for now.

Flavour of the month just now is the alleged intention of government to remove the requirement for ‘Financial Advisors’ to tell their clients that the package that they are eagerly pushing as in the client’s best interest is in fact that which gives the Advisor the largest commission – preferably with trailing commission extending to infinity.

And you know what? I think I am in favour of that. It’s just another useless bit of legislation that we can do well without.

If the legal system worked as it should, anyone who tried that sort of trick would be liable to a charge of simple dishonesty and would rapidly find themselves impoverished for life. THAT would work. The present system is just another scheme to enrich lawyers.

What we really need is a police/legal system that puts its resources – and awards punishment – where it most benefits society. And leaves citizens who have not set out to harm anyone SEVERELY ALONE.

I have said before, and don’t mind repeating endlessly if need be, that in any case before the law it should be asked:

1. Was anyone physically harmed – including restriction of liberty? If NO then this is a second or third, level or trivial charge. Go to 2.
2. Was there a realistic probability that physical harm could have resulted? If NO then this is a third level or trivial charge. Go to 3.
3. Was anyone deprived of their wealth or possessions? If NO this is a trivial charge.

Only a first level charge should result in a custodial sentence, which should be mandatory. Physical injury cannot be recompensed, although additional financial penalties may – and usually will – be appropriate.

A second level charge, where deliberate malice is involved, should result in severe and prolonged restriction of movement. If through neglect of a duty of care, restriction of movement for a period and a possible ban on employment where that duty of care is necessary should result. In both cases additional financial penalties may be appropriate.

In a case of simple carelessness, where care is not a specific duty, a period of general inconvenience will suffice.

A third level charge, if found proven, should result in substantial financial penalties, proportional to the amounts involved, in addition to the return or replacement of all sums or items involved . If the offence results from a breach of duty to act in the best interests of a client, penalties should be doubled.

Note: ALL financial penalties should be paid to the person or persons harmed. The law ought NEVER to be used as a cash collection agency for government at any level.

Trivial charges should be dismissed or result in a short period of minor inconvenience. Temporary confiscation of vehicles, house arrest, reporting to police, at inconvenient times, and conspicuous public display of details of the offence and the perpetrator, should be used in serious or repetitive cases.

The punishment for ANY offence should be complete. It should not include repeated harm caused by disclosure of the conviction to any person.

Convictions should be recorded in secrecy; disclosed to the court in the event of conviction for a repeat offence, but NOT disclosed to ANY person under any other circumstance.

To disclose such a record OR TO ATTEMPT TO DISCOVER SUCH A RECORD should itself constitute a restriction of liberty – a level 1 offence.

EXCEPT in the case of perversion or repeated violence (or threats of violence) where it MUST be publicly disclosed for the protection of possible victims. And Public Humiliation is obviously public, but re-broadcasting the details after the end of the period of punishment should be an offence in itself.

I recently heard a rather confused woman advocating no penalty for a particular (extremely serious) offence and supporting her case by saying that the best deterrent was the likelihood of detection and punishment. (If you can’t see the fallacy here, don’t waste your time trying to follow my arguments.)

Well I believe she was absolutely right in her second point. When the police and courts are unencumbered with trivial and pointless cases, the police can concentrate on matters of importance and the courts can do their work promptly and efficiently. This should substantially increase the likelihood of conviction and punishment for offences that actually matter. Which in turn should spiral upward, reducing offences, as the likelihood of conviction and punishment increases, and thus reducing the numbers of police, lawyers, and hangers-on, needed to uphold the law and administer the legal system.

This in turn should result in a substantial reduction in costs and release a significant number of people from the system to seek productive employment, as well as saving the general public a great deal of pointless irritation and inconvenience.

Good for the economy, beneficial to the community, and very bad news to those who want an easy life strutting and arguing without contributing anything of substance to society.

In my opinion a call girl has more moral integrity than most members of the legal fraternity.

31

 

Here comes another Australian election, complete with the old furphy ‘You are legally obliged to vote’.

You aren’t of course; you are legally obliged to attend a polling station or send in a postal vote but you can’t be forced to choose anyone. So the whole process starts with a lie. Quite appropriate really.

 

Why do we have this offensive rule that interferes with our liberty to vote (or not) as we please? The answer is obvious. Our politicians know very well that most of us don’t think that any of them are worth voting for. Compulsion is the only way to pretend that they are our choice.

The stupid ‘preferences’ idea is a part of the same thing. It gives the major parties a way to pretend that they receive more votes than they really do. And most of all it gives them more power to squeeze out any real choices that we might otherwise have.

The other really offensive and insulting thing is the way the major parties squeal that a vote for anyone but them is wasted.

Well recently it backfired on them. We managed to elect some real people, just like us, into the Senate. They may well have agendas that I disagree with but that doesn’t matter. Those votes weren’t wasted. They are a tiny spear of democracy piercing the leather hide of party politics. And with any luck the tip will be poisoned.

The really delightful irony is that this apparently happened due largely – or so ‘they’ claim – as a result of their stupid ‘preferences’ system. Maybe if we can repeat the result often enough we can say goodbye to that.

And to cap it all, Clive Palmer was elected. Now Clive isn’t like us – he’s big and rich and pushy.

All true, but he’s not a politician, or a lawyer or, worse still, both. So he’s a lot more like us than most of ‘them’ are. And their frightened howls when they realised that he was going to win were music to my ears. This might encourage other real people, powerful, energetic, real people, to challenge their cosy little fairy castle.

Didn’t they scream and piddle themselves, rushing to change the rules so that we’ll have no choice but to elect them? And I find it hard to believe that the mysterious loss of votes in Western Australia was an accident. If it looks like a duck…

Well now that we’ve got them running scared we’d better act fast, before they can tighten up their defences even more. And it’s really simple. I have been doing it for years but it won’t work unless you do it too:

If you don’t like them DON’T VOTE FOR THEM. VOTE FOR SOMEBODY ELSE. It doesn’t matter much whom at this stage, although we would do well to avoid those people who have used their so-called independence to prop up unpopular governments. They are mere party hacks in disguise. Just pick someone harmless, like the Fishing Party or the Party Party or the Sex Party.

They aren’t real parties of course; they just have to call themselves something. Mostly they are just PEOPLE. And that is what we need. You want a slogan? OK here it is:

PEOPLE IN, LAWYERS OUT.

That should take care of the majority of professional politicians. We can weed out or emasculate the rest later.

32

Although I have studied a number of constitutions and am aware of what were, until recent acts of political vandalism, the important and accepted tenets of the unwritten British constitution, I thought it best to attempt my first draft of an Australian constitution without reference to the existing one.

Having done so, and refreshed my mind with a re-reading of John Stuart Mill on Liberty, I have taken a run through our present document, plus the excellent overview by the Australian Government Solicitor, and realise that it is more badly flawed than I imagined.

One problem with the extant Constitution of Australia is that it was written at the time when Australia was a group of colonies under the rule of Queen Victoria.

As a result, many of its provisions were met at the time of federation and others are not appropriate to modern conditions. These irrelevancies need to be removed.

For example: it is inconceivable that a law should nowadays be passed restricting the rights of certain citizens on the grounds of race; therefore the provision to do so should be removed.

We give our citizenship too freely but, having done so, a citizen is (or ought to be) a citizen, and the term ‘race’ has no meaning in that context.

A second problem is that the constitution was written to entrench the power of certain political elements and the judiciary of the time. It was NOT written to provide protection of the rights of citizens and does not even acknowledge the existence of any such rights.

We should require two changes in this respect:

1. The inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the manner of the American constitution.

(A terrifying idea, embodied in recent legislation, is that if anyone chooses to take offence – regardless of the words or actions resulting in this charge and of the intention of the accused person – a punishable offence has been committed. We desperately need protection from this sort of madness NOW.)

2. A mandate for the courts and Parliament to respect the letter and the intention of that Bill, unlike the practice of the American judiciary and governments where it is flouted at will.

A third problem arose out of petty jealousy and snobbery between the States of Victoria and New South Wales – which still exists. This is the determination of the location of the National Capital. The wording embodies the sentiment ‘No way in Victoria but convenient for those who come from Sydney’.

This has resulted in the Capital being located in a desolate area of climatic extremes, extremely inconvenient for those Members of Parliament travelling from Perth and Darwin and not much better for those from Hobart, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Geographically, Alice Springs is the obvious choice but climatically it is less than ideal.

Commonsense suggests that the equitable climate of Brisbane makes it the best location, although the distance from Perth and other State capitals is still a drawback. However, if you have a long journey anyway, surely it would be pleasanter to arrive in Brisbane, rather than in Canberra, at the end of it?

I will just note here that, as a pommy migrant:

a. I have no geographical allegiance, although Port Adelaide is my adopted home, and

b. I have dual citizenship and, as a former member of the RAF, took an oath of allegiance to the Monarch; both of which debar me from standing for Parliament, and

c. I’m too old anyway, so I have no personal interest in where it is.

In fact the function of the constitution was simply to allay the fears of the various petty colonial governments within Australia that they would be upstaged by the new Federal government. And that, to the various petty State governments of the present day, is still its only political purpose.

The Constitution was of course drawn up by lawyers, so it is unsurprising that it gives sweeping powers to the judiciary and effectively provides judges and magistrates with total protection from dismissal, however idle, incompetent, biased, perverted or dishonest they may be.

(In that respect we follow American practice closely. Although they attempted, by making some Judicial positions elective, to give the citizenry some control, all of their major positions are political gifts and their occupants need demonstrate little consideration of fairness and equity toward, or between, ordinary citizens.)

We need also to strengthen the position of the press and other media. Despite the low and degenerating standards on the part of many in the industry there is no one else who can be trusted to uncover dishonest or other unacceptable behaviour by members of the establishment – in which I include the Unions.

It seems strange that, with these and other manifest deficiencies, the only current proposal to amend our constitution is apparently to ‘Recognise the Indigenous Population of Australia’.

What on earth does that mean? Apart from the appalling treatment that they received from the invading white hordes and the fact that they were until very recently disenfranchised, in what way do the indigenous peoples differ from the rest of us? They are here. So are Greeks and Poms and Afghans and Germans and Italians and Lebanese and Syrians and Chinese and…We all need to get along and be nice to each other. If we are not going to all go away and leave the indigenous peoples in peace – and we are too selfish to do that – they are stuck with us. We need to remove barriers, not erect more by singling some group out for special recognition.

33.

Oh Boy! It’s happened again. I see from a column in our local paper that a woman has been fined for blocking access to her own driveway. Now isn’t that a strange thing. When I park in my driveway it stops anyone else from accessing it. I wonder how long it will be before I am fined for this.

And it gets better. Nobody at the council offices would speak to her or respond to her email. Do NONE of you object to these piddling little bureaucrats with their total lack of responsibility for their own actions or those taken in their name? Wouldn’t you like to see the lot of them sacked and replaced by people willing to listen to reason and act sensibly?

Recently I heard that a man had been fined in Queensland for not closing his car window when he left it for a while. I wonder what the fine is for failing to lock your door when you go out of your house? And I seem to recall that there was a bye law in Brisbane making it an offence to lock your bicycle to a bench on the pavement – although presumably it is an offence not to lock it at all – despite the fact that the council provides no bicycle racks and hardly anyone ever sits on the benches.

Of course our elected representatives have no power to get rid of these plonkers and replace them with people willing to earn their money. Not councillors, not state MP’s, nor federal ones. Their unions would scream the place down if any of the people whom WE elect to govern our society actually tried to eliminate any of them.

Of course you might say that these people are no worse than those in business who employ poorly paid but desperate people (laughingly called Customer Service Representatives) to parrot endless garbage down the telephone until their enraged customers give up trying to obtain any restitution for poor service or shoddy goods. But they are.

Although our options are shrinking rapidly we do still have some choice over where we spend such money as our multiplicity of governments allow us to keep. Retailers still have some incentive to compete, unlike banks, which struggle in unison to attain ever lower standards of service. But the people laughingly known as ‘Public Servants’ have no competition and enjoy absolute security. Even if their ranks were thinned, as some politicians like to threaten though they haven’t the guts to follow through, it would not be through any measure of incompetence.

Who has ever said “We will reduce the numbers by throwing out the Ill Mannered, the Pig Headed, the Idle and the Inept? Has any ‘Public Servant’ anywhere in the world EVER been chucked out for any of these reasons. My own impression, gained over very many years of unavoidable encounters with these creatures, is that those are the principal characteristics required for promotion.

It seems that within the human race rational people are outnumbered by a sub culture to whom fairness, consideration, personal responsibility, and the simple desire to get along with others, are incomprehensible. It certainly explains the result of universal suffrage.

Climbing out of the morass – or rather scrambling up the side of it – toward the usual field of my labours, I have been struck by the public auction of favours that passes for election campaigning. Those striving for our vote tomorrow vie with each other to gain our favour with offers of Road Improvements, New Hospitals, Improvements in Education, Jobs, etc. etc. As far as I know, NOBODY has pointed out that these are all things that WE will pay for – except the jobs, which they have no power to create anyway.

Governments don’t make money. They take it from US or they borrow it and WE pay the interest. Anything they spend is OURS.

It’s nice of them to spare a little over from their salaries and expense accounts and lifetime pensions and perks to use for things of public benefit but I can’t see how it makes one of them any better than another. That’s quite apart from the fact that they are under no obligation to keep any of their promises anyway, and frequently don’t.

Thinking of this latest farcical election I found myself considering the virtues of an unelected body, such as the English House of Lords. The nice thing about such a body is that the members are free to use their intelligence, follow their consciences, and pay serious attention to the views of others. Once they are in, nobody can threaten them with dismissal or de-selection or any other harm. And by and large they rise to the occasion, behaving sensibly and damping down the more ludicrous excesses of the lower house.

A Senate dominated by one party or another is either a blank cheque or an obstructive nuisance. Perhaps if we drastically limited the number of senators that any party could have it would behave more usefully. But I still think that tenure would be better. Perhaps senators should be obliged to take an oath not to support or be a member of any political party.

I tried writing to the local newspaper pointing out that we can repeat our recent successes in the senate if we simply avoid voting for either of the major parties. They didn’t print it of course; they are part of Murdoch’s empire and anxious to preserve the major parties, despite the ludicrous pretence that they are opposed to any of them.

For the record, I shall go tomorrow to ensure that my vote will not, as far as I can control it, benefit any major party. I’m not expecting a miracle but if we can sneak in even one real representative in place of a party hack I will be delighted.

34

Meanwhile, down at code pathetic, our bizarre electoral system has resulted in a technical draw between the major parties in this State. This despite the fact that one party received well over 50% of the total vote.

I had hoped that more non-aligned candidates would be successful but only two were elected to the lower house. They would not have been my choice had there been any alternatives. In our own electorate the incumbent was returned easily, She is a nice girl whom we know slightly – pity about her politics.

I must admit that none of the five alternatives on offer to us appealed to me, I just listed them in order of least undesirable.

Attendance at the polls is mandatory, although there is a note on the voting paper saying that it is not compulsory to mark the paper. I would much prefer a positive alternative – a box labeled ‘None of the Above’ would do nicely. If the number of us who ticked that box were published it might well encourage more people to stand for election and give us a real choice. (Since writing that, I understand that the Indian government has proposed giving its voters exactly that option.)

We have not received the Senate results yet. Our weird system allows failed candidates to direct their votes to others of their choice – and so ad infinitum – unless one specifically lists every candidate in order of preference.

One can pick one of half a dozen parties listed ‘above the line’ and let them do what they like with one’s vote, or plod through and list every one of the individuals listed below it.

In some states this amounts to over 120 names; in ours his time it was 63, whom I worked through backwards from the least desirable at #63. My wife uses a slightly different system, listing her first two choices and then working backwards through the rest. Whichever way, if you make an error in the numbers the paper is void. Why we can’t just list half a dozen and leave the rest is beyond my understanding. It all seems a part of the pretence that we want to vote for any of them, combined with a strong incentive to choose one of the major parties, rather than plod through the tedium of voting ‘below the line’. (I believe that this option is now available in some states.)

I think the colloquial name for the system ‘two party preferred’ indicates the way it is deliberately biased against individuals gaining entry. It reflects the fact that at the end of the day most of the votes directed elsewhere end up supporting one of the two major parties.

The Greens managed to make a dent in that cosy system for a while, before they were infiltrated and taken over by people with a taste for world domination and little interest in the ecology.

Now they are becoming perceived as a cut-price version of the Labor party.

The Democrats – invented right here in South Australia – used to be a force to be reckoned with, until they decided to commit ritual suicide a few years back. There was an attempt at revival which I was keen to support until I discovered that they too were focused on world domination and had little interest in the people they were proposing to represent.

Apathy rules!

I think I’ll stick this on the blog. Pity nobody ever reads it, or bothers to weigh in with some constructive criticism.

35

Just for a change here’s something a bit different. My good American friend has grave concerns about the governance of his country and we exchange emails on the subject of change and how it might be accomplished. He has suggested that my latest to him, in response to a very vigorous and convincing online critique that he pointed me to, should be printed here.

Perhaps he is tactfully saying that it is an improvement on the sort of guff that I usually write here – and he may well be right. Here it is:

Revolutionary!

When you are feeling old and tired, just sliding down the last few feet of the ash chute into oblivion, it seems futile to protest. Change HAS to come from the young – but it’s so hard for them to envisage something other than the status quo.

Do people risk their lives to attain a dream or simply to escape a nightmare? Maybe to some degree motivated by both; but for most surely escape from the real is stronger than striving for the imagined. So the imagined can be left vague; then it is attained and may well turn out to be not at all what was expected.

The example of Egypt is salutary because it is contemporary, not because it is original. The manipulators, the Stalins, Napoleons and Hitlers have already perfected the model of using discontent to serve up unlimited power. Morsi had only to follow the simple instructions and voila! Instant Dictatorship. Silly man overlooked the need to compromise the army first. A few judicious promotions surely would have taken care of that.

But then, had the British had the sense to let their soldiers in the Green Mountains know that there was a war starting they probably wouldn’t have let their cannon be stolen. (For those who don’t know, those cannon were crucial to George Washington’s success in the American revolution.)

Unemployment has been a force in the past. If enough young, vigorous, clever people are excluded from society, impoverished and frustrated, whilst the already wealthy grow richer and older, maybe something will give. But are ample supplies of drones (oops! another word losing its real meaning) being bred and positioned to simply inherit the cash and perpetuate the system?

Internet and ipad, the dream world of Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google and the rest (if there is any ‘rest’) seem to be an adequate substitute for a life in many cases. Indeed, I find it a constant fight to prevent the Internet and its baubles from intruding further into my life and squeezing out all that really matters.

36

Meanwhile; back in present day Australia…

To some degree I am getting to like Tony Abbott. He didn’t really shine in the Howard government but he does seem to have grown in stature recently – perhaps because, as unchallenged Prime Minister, he can now speak his mind without much risk of censure within his own party.

I found two of his recent statements most interesting. I am taking them out of context but I think they are worth examining for their own sake.

The first statement was:

We want to reduce the amount of legislation.

That’s a good start. The key question that I would like every candidate for election , at every level of government, to answer is ‘How much legislation do you propose to repeal?‘

The second statement was:

‘We must decide how much freedom to allow you.’

That remark encapsulates – inadvertently I am sure – everything that I abhor about politics. What should be decided – in every case and in every situation – is how little interference with freedom there can and shall be.

The politician’s mantra should be ‘Don’t interfere unless you absolutely must, and then only to the smallest degree that is absolutely essential to the preservation of peace and good order.’

That should be burned into the brain of every person in every position in every level of government.

And we should vote only for candidates who declare that to be their principal guide. Preferably ones who have already demonstrated it but we may have to wait for a while until we have any of those.

And the next question that those in government should most frequently ask is ‘How much previous interference can we now dispense with?’

The field of taxation offers splendid (I almost said ‘rich’ but that might be misleading) opportunities.

Instead of a massive volume of detailed legislation, providing overpaid employment for millions of lawyers and tax agents and establishing millions of ‘public servants’ in purpose built palaces, with access to massive data banks and vast computer power, why not apply the Willie Sutton rule?

The famous bank robber was asked why he robbed banks and is widely misquoted as replying ‘Because that’s where the money is’. And this principle has been incorporated into medical diagnosis as ‘Sutton’s Rule’, which states that the first place to look for a problem is the most obvious one.

In this respect it is similar to ‘Occam’s Razor’, which says that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one. So what do we conclude?

Take the money that you need from the banks.

The idea is inherently fair. Poor people don’t have much money and don’t move it about much – if indeed it reaches a bank at all. If you impose a tax of a tiny, fixed percentage of each movement out of an account you will only need enough people to monitor the banks and other financial institutions and you can collect whatever sum is necessary to fund all legitimate government activities.

And, provided you impose draconian penalties on bank directors for any malfeasance, that will put an end to tax dodging.

(You wouldn’t tax deposits of course; you want the stuff to be put in there.)

An obvious objection is that people will move to a cash economy. This is easy to combat by limiting the money supply and frequently reissuing the currency – with strict limits on the amount that can be exchanged for the new issue. There may be some resort to barter but it is difficult to imagine this taking place on a major scale. On the plus side it would be a great help in combating money laundering.

Another useful scheme would be to make all transport infrastructure creation and maintenance costs, plus the cost of all licencing and third-party insurance, a charge on road fuels.

This is inherently fair, as those who make the heaviest use of the system will pay the most. A man who travels by bicycle has no need of freeways and ought not to pay for them. He will gain some benefit from efficient infrastructure from lower transport costs for his goods, but he will pay for that in the purchase price.

And so, at a stroke, another massive edifice of ‘Public Servants’ can be swept away.

The difficulty, which I have observed before, is what do we do with all of these unemployed lawyers and clerks. Is it even possible to train them to do something useful and is anyone prepared to invest the time and capital needed to create productive employment for them?

And here I think we have the nub of the problem. First and foremost the government needs to keep these people busy. If they are reasonably intelligent and not kept busy they will become a nuisance to us all. (Well they already are, of course, but in a way sanctioned by society.)

The possibility of creating gainful employment is so extremely complex that I will avoid discussing it here. I will only comment that, as far as I am aware, no government has ever done so and government claims to have facilitated its creation should be regarded with deep suspicion. As long as governments contain the sort of idiot who had the brilliant notion of taxing employers for employing people it is difficult to imagine them doing anything constructive.

What is a matter of historical record is the privation and distress created by the introduction of mechanisation in England. This, combined with the enclosure of common land to force the population to work in the factories, was largely the cause of the settlement of America and mass migration to Canada, Australia and other colonies.

So, many people chose hardship in hostile surroundings over slavery and starvation in their own land; now they choose slavery over being deprived of their toys. But more and more have neither toys nor adequate food and shelter. Slaves are in over-supply. And the wonderful world of opportunity has put up a sign – ‘Members Only’.

Commerce is a wilful sort of God and subsistence is not ennobling. I don’t have the answers but I very much wish that more people were asking the questions.

37

Meanwhile; back in present day Australia…

To some degree I am getting to like Tony Abbott. He didn’t really shine in the Howard government but he does seem to have grown in stature recently – perhaps because, as unchallenged Prime Minister, he can now speak his mind without much risk of censure within his own party.

I found two of his recent statements most interesting. I am taking them out of context but I think they are worth examining for their own sake.

The first statement was:

We want to reduce the amount of legislation.

That’s a good start. The key question that I would like every candidate for election , at every level of government, to answer is ‘How much legislation do you propose to repeal?‘

The second statement was:

‘We must decide how much freedom to allow you.’

That remark encapsulates – inadvertently I am sure – everything that I abhor about politics. What should be decided – in every case and in every situation – is how little interference with freedom there can and shall be.

My response to that particular remark is ‘You work for US sonny and we have NOT awarded you the right to determine how much freedom we shall enjoy.’

The politician’s mantra should be ‘Don’t interfere unless you absolutely must, and then only to the smallest degree that is absolutely essential to the preservation of peace and good order.’

That should be burned into the brain of every person in every position in every level of government.

And we should vote only for candidates who declare that to be their principal guide. Preferably ones who have already demonstrated it but we may have to wait for a while until we have any of those.

And the next question that those in government should most frequently ask is ‘How much previous interference can we now dispense with?’

The field of taxation offers splendid (I almost said ‘rich’ but that might be misleading) opportunities.

Instead of a massive volume of detailed legislation, providing overpaid employment for millions of lawyers and tax agents and establishing millions of ‘public servants’ in purpose built palaces, with access to massive data banks and vast computer power, why not apply the Willie Sutton rule?

The famous bank robber was asked why he robbed banks and is widely misquoted as replying ‘Because that’s where the money is’. And this principle has been incorporated into medical diagnosis as ‘Sutton’s Rule’, which states that the first place to look for a problem is the most obvious one.

In this respect it is similar to ‘Occam’s Razor’, which says that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one. So what do we conclude?

Take the money that you need from the banks.

The idea is inherently fair. Poor people don’t have much money and don’t move it about much – if indeed it reaches a bank at all. If you impose a tax of a tiny, fixed percentage of each movement out of an account you will only need enough people to monitor the banks and other financial institutions and you can collect whatever sum is necessary to fund all legitimate government activities.

And, provided you impose draconian penalties on bank directors for any malfeasance, that will put an end to tax dodging.

(You wouldn’t tax deposits of course; you want the stuff to be put in there.)

An obvious objection is that people will move to a cash economy. This is easy to combat by limiting the money supply and frequently reissuing the currency – with strict limits on the amount that can be exchanged for the new issue. There may be some resort to barter but it is difficult to imagine this taking place on a major scale. On the plus side it would be a great help in combating money laundering.

Another useful scheme would be to make all transport infrastructure creation and maintenance costs, plus the cost of all licencing and third-party insurance, a charge on road fuels.

This is inherently fair, as those who make the heaviest use of the system will pay the most. A man who travels by bicycle has no need of freeways and ought not to pay for them. He will gain some benefit from efficient infrastructure from lower transport costs for his goods, but he will pay for that in the purchase price.

And so, at a stroke, another massive edifice of ‘Public Servants’ can be swept away.

The difficulty, which I have observed before, is what do we do with all of these unemployed lawyers and clerks. Is it even possible to train them to do something useful and is anyone prepared to invest the time and capital needed to create productive employment for them?

And here I think we have the nub of the problem. First and foremost the government needs to keep these people busy. If they are reasonably intelligent and not kept busy they will become a nuisance to us all. (Well they already are, of course, but in a way sanctioned by society.)

The possibility of creating gainful employment is so extremely complex that I will avoid discussing it here. I will only comment that, as far as I am aware, no government has ever done so and government claims to have facilitated its creation should be regarded with deep suspicion. As long as governments contain the sort of idiot who had the brilliant notion of taxing employers for employing people it is difficult to imagine them doing anything constructive.

What is a matter of historical record is the privation and distress created by the introduction of mechanisation in England. This, combined with the enclosure of common land to force the population to work in the factories, was largely the cause of the settlement of America and mass migration to Canada, Australia and other colonies.

So, many people chose hardship in hostile surroundings over slavery and starvation in their own land; now they choose slavery over being deprived of their toys. But more and more have neither toys nor adequate food and shelter. Slaves are in over-supply. And the wonderful world of opportunity has put up a sign – ‘Members Only’.

Commerce is a wilful sort of God and subsistence is not ennobling. I don’t have the answers but I very much wish that more people were asking the questions.

37

Discussing the ongoing and apparently accelerating collapse of justice in the USA, with the government now permitting the military to arrest and detain its citizens without trial or representation, and reflecting on similar attitudes toward liberty and due process here and in the UK, I had the following thoughts:

The really scary thing is that as this goes on we will get used to it and fail to be scared. Then it will be too late - if it is not already. It is evident that governments, in the UK, the USA and here in Australia, are running scared of bogey men and phantom organisations instead of focusing their resources tightly on real threats. Are they in fact too scared to act resolutely against actual enemies for fear of retribution? It is much safer to bail up a few harmless people on minor or outright faked charges than to go after dangerous terrorists - until the terrorists win.

Am I being unfair to our politicians and our Feral Police? I hardly think so. WHEN I see an unsolicited public apology for indefensible conduct, accompanied by public denouncement and removal of persons who have exceeded their authority and/or ignored proper process I MAY think that whatever ignorance, idleness, or corruption has led to this sort of conduct is not and will not be permitted. At the moment it is, if not actively encouraged, at least allowed to pass with neither stricture for the offenders nor apology to the offended.

It is encouraging to learn that there are in the USA jurists with enough pride and belief in the principles that they have sworn to uphold that they will tackle the government head on. But the government has the power, and has obviously used it, to load the ranks of higher court justices with its own lackeys, who will unquestioningly rubber-stamp any action that it chooses to take. So even the protests from within the system are swept aside.

One begins to understand the absolute determination of American citizens to retain the right to own weapons with which, in the extreme, they hope to be able to defend themselves from their own government. I used to think that was overstated; now I am becoming rapidly converted to the idea that it is America's only hope of avoiding a total slide into a Gestapo-like regime.

That brings up the disquieting thought 'was the Australian government's introduction of stiffer gun control laws motivated by a genuine wish to deter gun crime or was that just a convenient excuse to reduce the citizen's power to resist autocracy and a police state?'

The trouble is that reasonable people don't want to believe in conspiracies and power grabs. We pretend that they only happen in the Middle East or the Balkans. Or maybe Russia. But the sort of power-crazy people that succeed in those places exist in our society too. And I don't mean the religious sickos that we are importing in ever increasing numbers. They will certainly become a problem in the not too distant future but we already have enough home bred sickos here. They don't wear beards or turbans or any convenient outward sign of their type. A pig in a double-breasted suit and a club tie can pass as a statesman any day.

We hope that the little Hitlers of the Union movement will battle it out with the big Mussolinis of the Business world without harming us. It's just a show; an entertainment to amuse us and keep us from thinking things out for ourselves. None of them care a damn about us. All of them want to herd us into a pen and exploit us for their own gain. Behind the scenes they have far more in common with each other than with any of us.

Is there a way to stack our parliaments with a mix of people such that only legislation that can be agreed upon as essential by a majority of people is imposed upon us? That surely is the test of democratic freedom – no restraint except that which all agree is essential. Would it be possible in the present day to find a politician who can claim to have been won over by an opponent's speech in parliament and changed his vote as a consequence? Under the party system this is inconceivable. Nobody who did that would be preselected by the party at the next election. And we all know that a party label carries more credibility than competence or honesty. The procedures of parliament as currently practiced are therefore a sham and a waste of considerable amounts of public money.

The Ruling happens behind the scenes; so-called justice is a farce; and nobody cares. We are like herd animals on a plain. We know that predators want to attack us; we have no idea of how to organise our superior numbers to combat them, as we so easily could. We simply run and hope that someone else is pulled down and torn apart, whilst we survive for another day. Trying to help anyone who is hit upon is an open invitation to share the same fate.

37

Discussing the ongoing and apparently accelerating collapse of justice in the USA, with the government now permitting the military to arrest and detain its citizens without trial or representation, and reflecting on similar attitudes toward liberty and due process here and in the UK, I had the following thoughts:

The really scary thing is that as this goes on we will get used to it and fail to be scared. Then it will be too late - if it is not already. It is evident that governments, in the UK, the USA and here in Australia, are running scared of bogey men and phantom organisations instead of focusing their resources tightly on real threats. Are they in fact too scared to act resolutely against actual enemies for fear of retribution? It is much safer to bail up a few harmless people on minor or outright faked charges than to go after dangerous terrorists - until the terrorists win.

Am I being unfair to our politicians and our Feral Police? I hardly think so. WHEN I see an unsolicited public apology for indefensible conduct, accompanied by public denouncement and removal of persons who have exceeded their authority and/or ignored proper process I MAY think that whatever ignorance, idleness, or corruption has led to this sort of conduct is not and will not be permitted. At the moment it is, if not actively encouraged, at least allowed to pass with neither stricture for the offenders nor apology to the offended.

It is encouraging to learn that there are in the USA jurists with enough pride and belief in the principles that they have sworn to uphold that they will tackle the government head on. But the government has the power, and has obviously used it, to load the ranks of higher court justices with its own lackeys, who will unquestioningly rubber-stamp any action that it chooses to take. So even the protests from within the system are swept aside.

One begins to understand the absolute determination of American citizens to retain the right to own weapons with which, in the extreme, they hope to be able to defend themselves from their own government. I used to think that was overstated; now I am becoming rapidly converted to the idea that it is America's only hope of avoiding a total slide into a Gestapo-like regime.

That brings up the disquieting thought 'was the Australian government's introduction of stiffer gun control laws motivated by a genuine wish to deter gun crime or was that just a convenient excuse to reduce the citizen's power to resist autocracy and a police state?'

The trouble is that reasonable people don't want to believe in conspiracies and power grabs. We pretend that they only happen in the Middle East or the Balkans. Or maybe Russia. But the sort of power-crazy people that succeed in those places exist in our society too. And I don't mean the religious sickos that we are importing in ever increasing numbers. They will certainly become a problem in the not too distant future but we already have enough home bred sickos here. They don't wear beards or turbans or any convenient outward sign of their type. A pig in a double-breasted suit and a club tie can pass as a statesman any day.

We hope that the little Hitlers of the Union movement will battle it out with the big Mussolinis of the Business world without harming us. It's just a show; an entertainment to amuse us and keep us from thinking things out for ourselves. None of them care a damn about us. All of them want to herd us into a pen and exploit us for their own gain. Behind the scenes they have far more in common with each other than with any of us.

Is there a way to stack our parliaments with a mix of people such that only legislation that can be agreed upon as essential by a majority of people is imposed upon us? That surely is the test of democratic freedom – no restraint except that which all agree is essential. Would it be possible in the present day to find a politician who can claim to have been won over by an opponent's speech in parliament and changed his vote as a consequence? Under the party system this is inconceivable. Nobody who did that would be preselected by the party at the next election. And we all know that a party label carries more credibility than competence or honesty. The procedures of parliament as currently practiced are therefore a sham and a waste of considerable amounts of public money.

The Ruling happens behind the scenes; so-called justice is a farce; and nobody cares. We are like herd animals on a plain. We know that predators want to attack us; we have no idea of how to organise our superior numbers to combat them, as we so easily could. We simply run and hope that someone else is pulled down and torn apart, whilst we survive for another day. Trying to help anyone who is hit upon is an open invitation to share the same fate.

38

I am still worrying away at this political bone. I have had a good many years now to observe the system in action, both in Australia and the UK. I have even received the courtesy of a visit to a State Capitol in the USA. Also, if I had any doubts, I have the words of Barack Obabma that I quoted in an earlier commentary. ‘Nobody is listening’.

Yesterday I received an email containing two pictures of a chamber – I won’t say whose – debating two bills.

The first, concerning the disadvantage to handicapped people resulting from certain legislation showed attendance by a scattered handful of members.

The second, debating a bill to increase members’ salaries, was packed to the rafters. No doubt this matter was debated with the incisive sharpness of a tennis ball. The struggles of those opposing the measure would presumably have been apocalyptic.

Really, when the government of the day has a commanding majority, there seems little point in other members speaking or even being present. Parties are run on military lines; the leader decides the outcomes and the whips drive the troops forward regardless of their wish or inclination. Unlike a military battle though, the greatest number always win.

No weapons, no weight of truth or justice or plain commonsense will avail the opposition. Nobody is listening. They are not even thinking. There is no evidence that they are even capable of thought, or truthfulness, or comprehending the concept of justice. And the only time they are permitted to consult their consciences – if indeed they have them – in during a rare and generally unimportant ‘conscience vote’.

It has become clear in recent years that so-called ‘Independents’ are only too willing to prop up a government of any flavour, rather than risk their seats in another election before they are absolutely forced to. They use their balancing power to extort pork-barrel items from the government to their constituents, the better to enhance their chances of re-election when the next poll becomes inevitable, but contribute little else.

Dropping down a gear, let’s look at local government.

The thing that strikes me most about local government is its obsession with money.

The reason that we are all being encouraged to build houses in our backyards, and developers are encouraged to overshadow them with ever higher and more densely packed people hutches, is because this yields more income for the government to spend.

(At least, that is the motivation that we are supposed to accept. I find it ludicrous to ignore the probablility that a great amount of palm-greasing goes on and that little or no attempt is ever made to detect it and bring the parties involved to justice.)

There is not the slightest consideration of whether the existing population wants more money spent. And local government is in any case under ever increasing pressure by higher governments to provide more ‘services’ – whatever those may be.

I have to concede that there are people who expect government at some level to provide for their ‘needs’ and I am not referring only, or even mainly, to those at the bottom of the social scale. I don’t claim to know the reason for this; it could be simple inertia – an unwillingness to take responsibility to resolving competing demands for space and freedom of action – or an extraordinary preference for being ordered around and milked dry by greedy and arrogant persons.

In either of those cases it matters little what flavour of politics the rulers claim to represent. So a system that doesn’t require them to justify each individual imposition that they place on the rest of us is perfectly satisfactory.

Yet we continue to pretend that issues are debated, minds open to persuasion, and value placed on facts, even where those are unpalatable to the hearers.

They aren’t.

If you can bear to listen to the proceedings of Parliament you will hear excellent speeches, supported by verfiable data and impeccable logic, utterly disregarded. Not a mind is swayed. No mind of opposing view is even engaged. And all too often none is present.

And you will hear the droning of mindless drivel and hackneyed slogan, for no discernible purpose than to fill in time allotted for pointless justification.

However, what most people associate with Parliament is the sort of mindless invective that was the sole visible capability of Paul Keating. As a circus act I must concede that it was of a far higher standard than anything that recent performers have been able to achieve. The current level compares more with the behaviour of small and not particularly intelligent boys in a school yard. Can it really reflect the intelligence and ability of our ‘chosen’ representatives?

It seems depressingly likely that the mass of the population actually like their affairs to be ‘managed’ in this way. Certainly a brief glance at their apparent choice in telvision viewing supports this conclusion. And the apparent popularity of irrational ranting and bigotry on radio seems to confirm it. Neither of these require any engagement of the brain; perhaps the political process is correct in aiming for – and achieving – the same standard.

Nobody is listening. Because nobody cares. Is it Apathy? Stupidity? Frustration? Despair?

Apparently it is Inevitable.

39

Well yes – I gave up for a while. I failed to do a lot more things in that time, most of them more useful than politics. But now that Clive’s pups are chewing a few shoes, so to speak, there is at least some interest in Australian politics.

And still I have read no comments, anywhere by anyone, pointing out that this is how Parliaments are supposed to operate. Issues are debated, everyone listens to all the points raised and makes a decision on how to vote based on what they have heard – and how much of it they believe – and only those measures that meet with the approval of a majority are passed into law.

Perhaps I am the only person in Australia – or maybe the world – who believes in real Parliamentary government.

Horse trading behind the scenes – so-called ‘Independents’ toadying up to one side or the other and propping up governments with no real mandate so as to hang on to their own seats – is not democracy at work. Whining because you thought you had a deal cuts no ice with me. Any bill that has so little support that one or two switched votes can derail it should never be introduced.

Leaving the antics of Canberra aside for a moment, we have the interesting spectacle in South Australia of a politician elected as representing a major party accepting a position in the governing, opposing party. Now I don’t think much of people voting for a party label but the fact is that they do. And parties spend a lot of cash making sure that everyone knows which candidate is theirs. So for an elected politician to change sides and retain his seat is surely a greater case of misrepresentation than anything that would be permitted to a commercial company without penalty.

Change your views by all means but you’ve promised the electorate that you will represent a known set of values and to abandon those values for others that the people who elected you may abhor is simply cheating those who voted for you. Such a despicable person should be summarily ejected from the parliament if they have not the decency to resign of their own accord. If they wish for a seat let them compete honestly for one.

Getting back to the main arena, I do enjoy the shrieking and wailing of those who fear that their little apple carts will be upset by this handful of real people who have somehow broken in to their cosy private club. ‘Oh dear, they don’t seem to understand the rules; we shall have to train them to be like us.’ I have news for you, sweetheart. They don’t want to be like you and you have no means of intimidating them. And now that we have found a way to break through this arcane electoral system, so carefully crafted to pretend that people have voted for dickheads that they don’t really want a bar of, we are unlikely to stop there.

I look forward to seeing further novel ways of directing votes toward real people and right now I don’t give a damn who they are or what they stand for. Perhaps more people like Clive Palmer, with a successful career in business or any other responsible field, may be persuaded to step up and take a role in public affairs for a time – as in a real Democracy! The major parties offer little attraction for most voters.

Look at what we have at present:

The Liberals and their coalition represent big business, whatever verbal sop they may offer to small business people. The overall effect of their policies will always be to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. However, there is some chance that the poor will be left with something. To vote for them is the best, bad choice.

The Greens give no more than lip service to the environment and devote their energies to verbal attacks on Israel, for some obscure reason, and propping up the Labor party. Nothing that they do is likely to promote prosperity for anyone. To vote for them is rather pointless.

The Labor party was created to give a voice to the Union movement and there is therefore no way that union influence within it can be considered excessive. People seem to overlook that fact.

In reality it exists to provide cushy jobs for people of questionable integrity and doubtful competence but if union members choose to be represented by those sort of people that’s their prerogative. It’s just a pity that the Union movement throws up such creeps – the old phenomenon of scum rising to the top. They are the only people to prosper under a Labor government. To vote for them is simply to keep their noses in the public trough.

(If other Labor supporters don’t like it they should join or form a different party.)

And we have had a few so-called Independents who are mostly closet Labor supporters who have some particular axe to grind and little interest in anything else apart from retaining their seats at all cost. A vote for them is only useful if you are desperately anxious to see whatever peculiar measure they promote succeed, whether it be freedom to take dope or compulsory religious observance.

So anybody or any party that comes on the scene has to offer some prospect of improvement. Even if they only make life difficult for the people who thought that they were born with a God-given right to rule the rest of us they are welcome to my vote. I cannot recall a previous time when politics were interesting.

I’ll finish with a nod to the mundane. I think I mentioned earlier my astonishment that the NSW government has seen fit to introduce special penalties for persons who succeed in killing someone with one punch. I saw some reference to it again recently, which reminded me.

Will this be followed by a special law for people who kill someone with one shot? Or one stab? Or one bash over the head with a brick?

And why stop there? We could have special laws for each number of punches, shots, stabs, bashes over the head and indeed multiples of every imaginable method of causing death. The lawyers could then enjoy endless hours of highly-paid argument about every incident – even more than at present.

The temptation for lawyer/politicians will surely prove irresistible.

Here's a thought. Instead of having highly paid judges in secure employment that enables them to make grossly unjust decisions without fear of criticism or punishment, why not appoint citizens temporarily to the job just as they are called to jury duty? It would be a lot cheaper and there is no reason to suppose that their decisions would be less flawed.

40

It’s a long time since I wrote anything; well someone has to provide the surgical profession with their superannuation. Unfortunately being the subject of their work can be distracting, even when it is successful. Indeed, its very success makes possible pleasant activities that have previously been constrained, such as extensive travel. And this in turn can distract, especially as Internet access, although theoretically universal, can be somewhat dependent on the facilities offered by the places where one stays. But above all I have been writing about politics and it is SO BLOODY BORING.

It is boring because nothing much changes. Idealists are totally committed to ramming their ideas down our throats without trying to discover whether they are either practicable or capable of creating the beneficial effects that they claim will result. Worse, this apparently blinds them to their own weaknesses, to the extent that they are easily elbowed aside by the venomous and self-centred elements of society.  Which in its turn focuses the efforts of the defenders of freedom and fairness to rush us back to the other extreme.

And so we see excessive greed and mindless compassion sway to and fro – complicated by a side-serving of lunatic religious fanaticism.

I conclude that the real problem for people like me, who do not want to manipulate other people or order them about, is that we can’t prevent those who wish to do so from interfering with us, other than by using their own methods. Which is self-defeating.

As for the religious nutters, how can they possibly imagine a being capable of creating the universe – and indeed infinity, since there is no reason to doubt the existence of many universes – who has all the characteristics of an irritable old man, so insecure that he needs us feeble creatures to fall down and worship him at frequent intervals, in order to boost his self-esteem?

It is recorded that the great scientist Ampere, who gave his name to the unit of measurement of electric current, was wont to say after each of his many discoveries ‘How great God is.’ Exactly. Humanity has created precisely nothing. We are mechanics, tinkering with God’s creation. We cannot ‘make’ a grain of sand or a blade of grass and to presume that our behaviour is more important to God than that of a slug or earwig is ludicrously presumptuous.

One thing that we do have in common with all of God’s creatures is a tendency to expand our numbers until we destroy our environment – and everyone else’s of course.  And it is in this one capability that we excel.

Well that’s cleared my mind a bit so I’ll move on to the subject that I originally intended to address, namely Bullshit.

You may well say that this is hardly a change of subject from politics and religion but bear with me, O faithful imaginary followers. I wish merely to explore and amplify some detail of the excellent and scholarly paper ‘On Bullshit’ by Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University.

(I commend to you the original, which may be found at http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf)

Mr Frankfurt discusses whether intention is a characteristic of bullshit and invokes Ludwig Wittgenstein as follows:

Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve him as a motto:

In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.

For the benefit of those who believe in only a single God we could modify the last line to read:

For God, we know, sees everywhere.

Now that is very fine and an excellent precept but is it germane to our subject?

Where bullshit is used for the purpose of obfuscation, a practice that is widely observed by many politicians especially those occupying ministerial positions, it may be beautifully crafted, with exquisite care. You may say that this is not the same as the hidden work of the craftsmen to which the poem alludes, yet insofar as they, for example, finely engraved the obverse of a clock face, this did not in any way contribute to the accuracy with which the clock kept time. Nor even did it contribute to the visible ornamentation of the piece. It was done for their benefit, not that of the beholder. They did, though, endeavour to attain the same perfection in the visible and utilitarian features of their work.

I conclude that we may justifiably admire the skill with which reality is obscured within a finely constructed example of bullshit, without implying approval of its distortion or concealment of truth. This we may term subtle bullshit. Its intention is unquestionably to benefit the bullshitter although, in its highest form, it is intended also to imply benefit to the hearer. ‘Vote for Me! You’ll never regret it.’ or ‘This will benefit the Whole Nation’ or perhaps ‘All of Humanity’. Expressed in fifteen paragraphs without actually using any of those words. Where it differs from the work of the craftsman is in the fact that it results in no compensating utility whatever.

There is of course what we may class as crude bullshit; the sort of thing that is spoken by persons who are unaware of their own ignorance and, far from wishing to mislead their audience, present their own delusions in an honest belief that they are the truth. It is extremely hard to differentiate these bullshitters from those who are deliberately trying to deceive; fortunately it matters little provided we recognise the need to disregard both.

Mr Frankfurt gives another Wittgenstein example:

Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of “non-sense.” He was apparently like that in his personal life as well. This comes out in an anecdote related by Fania Pascal, who knew him in Cambridge in the 1930s:

“I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling
sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: ‘I feel just like a dog
that has been run over.’ He was disgusted: ‘You don’t know what a
dog that has been run over feels like.'”

Now who knows what really happened? It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings—so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a dog”—is simply not provocative enough to arouse any response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not be?

Mr Frankfurt does not say that Wittgenstein preceded his statement with the expression ‘Bullshit’. Coarser persons might have said ‘Bollocks’ but the little that I have read of Wittgenstein suggests that he was not of a coarse nature.

Most people would surely interpret Pascal’s remark as shorthand for ‘I feel as awful as I imagine a dog that has been run over would feel’. And we would not expect a person in that condition to engage in excessive precision of language.

Although precision in language was a major part of Wittgenstein’s philosophical outlook, as an Austrian his first language was German; a precise and structured language. And although he lived in England – he died in Cambridge in 1951 – he perhaps did not grasp, or refused to accept, the fact that nuances and understatement are structural elements in the English language, particularly in its spoken form. Possibly he simply did not realise that the English like it that way and are strenuously opposed to any attempt to reduce its capacity for implication and innuendo.

In complete contrast, Josef Conrad, despite his Polish roots and the fact that he was 40 years old before publishing his first writing, had an innate understanding of the niceties and subtleties of English. If Conrad wrote bullshit it would be because he wished it to be understood as such.

Well that will do for now I think. Possibly you will say ‘What utter bullshit’ which is a fair comment on anything presented in an attempt to entertain which falls short of the standard expected by the reader.

Nonetheless, I may develop this theme further in subsequent blogs, whilst I seek in vain for any material of substance in the political/legal world.

41

Just after I concluded the last entry I received a delivery of the very material under discussion. It falls into the major Bullshit sub-category Salesmanship, section Telephone.

To be absolutely fair I must also acknowledge that this particular Bullshit has, for me, considerable entertainment value. Indeed I have encouraged it in the past by allowing the caller to present his spiel and also to send me ‘proofs’ of the viability of the scheme that he is attempting to peddle. He is polite and courteous, asks if his call is convenient and offers to postpone it if not.

Not wishing to be unfair, I do warn him that he is unlikely to be successful and suggest that it may be more productive for him to terminate the call and devote his time to a more amenable prospect. He has always declined this invitation but I did this time detect a degree of disgust and impatience when, after listening to a long and passionate exposition of the virtues of his scheme, I indicated continuing disinterest.

Not wishing to be mysterious either, I will outline the particular Bullshit under discussion. The basic premise is that a panel of experts in financial fields has been assembled, these people being able to predict movements in the stock market index with better than 50% accuracy. Using this information, punters are invited, via smartphone, to bet a 5% stake of their capital invested in the company’s scheme on each predicted up or down movement.

Impressive spreadsheets show how following this scheme would, despite convincing losses from time to time, have produced enormous gains over a year, provided that all of the alerts were responded to.

Now one of the points made during the spiel is that it is entirely optional which alerts the punter responds to. But any attempt to point out that it wouldn’t take too many omissions and wrong choices to lose the entire capital or at least produce a very different result from that shown in the examples is brushed aside with a skill that one can only admire.

And that insertion of carefully crafted negative results into the spreadsheets is true artistry. At times the ‘investment’ capital surges upward, only to lose all of its gains and fall to dangerous levels before climbing inexorably once more, despite further intermittent losses of carefully crafted magnitude, to eventually conclude with a huge and triumphant gain.

I had no heart to point out to the caller that anyone with access to such a sure-fire money making scheme, over the time during which the scheme has so far been touted, would hardly choose to spend his days on the phone, in a room echoing with many other calls in the background, trying to share his good fortune with others. Or even, if such a good Samaritan could be found, that a roomful of others could be found to share in the attempt.

I must admit that I find the scheme more credible than the horse racing scheme that I believe was originally promoted by the same people. I don’t recall the ingenious ‘reasoning’ that lay behind that scheme as it was temptingly placed before me, but it was, as I recall, quite persuasive. And definitely Bullshit.

(I could I suppose save a few letters by typing ‘scam’ rather than ‘scheme’ but I don’t want to be less polite than the promoters.)

It is perfectly possible that the promoters may apply the punters’ funds as they claim, using the device known as a CD. The gorgeously named Contract for Difference, or CD, is an alias for a bet with a broker that a share or index of shares will move up or down over a given time. It has nothing to do with actually buying or selling any shares – although the broker, or indeed the ‘investor’ might decide to do so in order to ‘hedge’ the bet.

In essence the CD is the financial system’s equivalent to betting which of two flies crawling up a window will reach the top first. It’s promotion as an ‘investment’ is a fine example of Bullshit in its own right,

Now the scam, sorry, scheme promoters operate ‘client’ (ie. punter) accounts and so have access to a very large quantity of money that they can place at interest in the financial markets . And if you have a very large sum of money there are extremely lucrative short term investment opportunities that you can take advantage of. So there is an opportunity, by simply delaying payouts to clients, for the promoters to make a tidy profit at no risk to themselves.

Then CD’s may indeed be bought corresponding to the published predictions, and a margin allowed between the payout on the successful CD’s and the payout to the punters. After all, the punters only know what they are told. It’s even possible that the promoters really do have some expertise or inside knowledge that enables them to achieve a better than 50% chance of guessing the movements of the index correctly. And when the punters lose, they don’t.

Overall, the fine combination of truth, assertion, and appeal to latent greed is truly one of the finest examples of pure Bullshit that I have encountered in a very long life. So convincing is it that, if I were younger and had a bit of spare cash, I would try it out. It’s probably a better bet than lottery tickets and need cost no more than some of my acquaintances spend on theatre tickets in the course of a year.

And there is the thought that it would be only fair to give the promoters some return for the enormous entertainment that their calls and brochures have given me over time.

So we see that being Bullshit does not mean that something has no value at all; it may have considerable entertainment value, whether this is intended or no. The name however implies that it has no value in the context in which it is presented. To qualify as Bullshit it must be completely lacking in intrinsic value.

In my next blog I will explore the huge, related field of Copywriting.

And now, for a complete change of subject (or is it?)

Religion corner.

Irreligious as I am, I can find no fault with the code of behaviour that we ought to observe toward one another which the Bible attributes to Jesus Christ; nor in His stated attitude to excessive wealth. The great mystery is why, out of everything written in the Bible, His instructions in these matters are totally disregarded by just about every variant of religion established in His name.

It seems probable that more Camels than Cardinals will pass through the eye of the needle.

41

Just after I concluded the last entry I received a delivery of the very material under discussion. It falls into the major Bullshit sub-category Salesmanship, section Telephone.

To be absolutely fair I must also acknowledge that this particular Bullshit has, for me, considerable entertainment value. Indeed I have encouraged it in the past by allowing the caller to present his spiel and also to send me ‘proofs’ of the viability of the scheme that he is attempting to peddle. He is polite and courteous, asks if his call is convenient and offers to postpone it if not.

Not wishing to be unfair, I do warn him that he is unlikely to be successful and suggest that it may be more productive for him to terminate the call and devote his time to a more amenable prospect. He has always declined this invitation but I did this time detect a degree of disgust and impatience when, after listening to a long and passionate exposition of the virtues of his scheme, I indicated continuing disinterest.

Not wishing to be mysterious either, I will outline the particular Bullshit under discussion. The basic premise is that a panel of experts in financial fields has been assembled, these people being able to predict movements in the stock market index with better than 50% accuracy. Using this information, punters are invited, via smartphone, to bet a 5% stake of their capital invested in the company’s scheme on each predicted up or down movement.

Impressive spreadsheets show how following this scheme would, despite convincing losses from time to time, have produced enormous gains over a year, provided that all of the alerts were responded to.

Now one of the points made during the spiel is that it is entirely optional which alerts the punter responds to. But any attempt to point out that it wouldn’t take too many omissions and wrong choices to lose the entire capital or at least produce a very different result from that shown in the examples is brushed aside with a skill that one can only admire.

And that insertion of carefully crafted negative results into the spreadsheets is true artistry. At times the ‘investment’ capital surges upward, only to lose all of its gains and fall to dangerous levels before climbing inexorably once more, despite further intermittent losses of carefully crafted magnitude, to eventually conclude with a huge and triumphant gain.

I had no heart to point out to the caller that anyone with access to such a sure-fire money making scheme, over the time during which the scheme has so far been touted, would hardly choose to spend his days on the phone, in a room echoing with many other calls in the background, trying to share his good fortune with others. Or even, if such a good Samaritan could be found, that a roomful of others could be found to share in the attempt.

I must admit that I find the scheme more credible than the horse racing scheme that I believe was originally promoted by the same people. I don’t recall the ingenious ‘reasoning’ that lay behind that scheme as it was temptingly placed before me, but it was, as I recall, quite persuasive. And definitely Bullshit.

(I could I suppose save a few letters by typing ‘scam’ rather than ‘scheme’ but I don’t want to be less polite than the promoters.)

It is perfectly possible that the promoters may apply the punters’ funds as they claim, using the device known as a CD. The gorgeously named Contract for Difference, or CD, is an alias for a bet with a broker that a share or index of shares will move up or down over a given time. It has nothing to do with actually buying or selling any shares – although the broker, or indeed the ‘investor’ might decide to do so in order to ‘hedge’ the bet.

In essence the CD is the financial system’s equivalent to betting which of two flies crawling up a window will reach the top first. It’s promotion as an ‘investment’ is a fine example of Bullshit in its own right,

Now the scam, sorry, scheme promoters operate ‘client’ (ie. punter) accounts and so have access to a very large quantity of money that they can place at interest in the financial markets . And if you have a very large sum of money there are extremely lucrative short term investment opportunities that you can take advantage of. So there is an opportunity, by simply delaying payouts to clients, for the promoters to make a tidy profit at no risk to themselves.

Then CD’s may indeed be bought corresponding to the published predictions, and a margin allowed between the payout on the successful CD’s and the payout to the punters. After all, the punters only know what they are told. It’s even possible that the promoters really do have some expertise or inside knowledge that enables them to achieve a better than 50% chance of guessing the movements of the index correctly. And when the punters lose, they don’t.

Overall, the fine combination of truth, assertion, and appeal to latent greed is truly one of the finest examples of pure Bullshit that I have encountered in a very long life. So convincing is it that, if I were younger and had a bit of spare cash, I would try it out. It’s probably a better bet than lottery tickets and need cost no more than some of my acquaintances spend on theatre tickets in the course of a year.

And there is the thought that it would be only fair to give the promoters some return for the enormous entertainment that their calls and brochures have given me over time.

So we see that being Bullshit does not mean that something has no value at all; it may have considerable entertainment value, whether this is intended or no. The name however implies that it has no value in the context in which it is presented. To qualify as Bullshit it must be completely lacking in intrinsic value.

In my next blog I will explore the huge, related field of Copywriting.

And now, for a complete change of subject (or is it?)

Religion corner.

Irreligious as I am, I can find no fault with the code of behaviour that we ought to observe toward one another which the Bible attributes to Jesus Christ; nor in His stated attitude to excessive wealth. The great mystery is why, out of everything written in the Bible, His instructions in these matters are totally disregarded by just about every variant of religion established in His name.

It seems probable that more Camels than Cardinals will pass through the eye of the needle.

42

So; Bullshit in Copywriting, as promised.

It’s true that Macbeth didn’t quite say ‘There is an art to hide the mind’s construction in the text.’ but if he’d been deluged with emails from people trying to flog him stuff he probably would have. Then he would quite likely have tracked down the senders and cut their bloody throats with his Claymore.

Sometimes I am sorely tempted to try Copywriting; after all, the people who teach it are extremely convincing when flogging their courses and I do not for a moment doubt their claim that the masters of the art command huge fees. And Macbeth was only a figment of Shakespeare’s imagination.

At the finest, most imaginative, crafted, polished, absolute peak of Copywriting, the mind’s construction, that is, the intention of the copywriter to flog you something that you would otherwise be entirely happy without, is totally hidden. Or rather, Obscured. By powerful doses of added Bullshit.

What flavours of Bullshit do we find in Copywriting?

• The ‘Free Gift’:

  We are offering you ABSOLUTELY FREE these (fifteen pages/10 chapters/5 volumes) of priceless information on Vole Fondling, the scientifically proven way to reduce stress/cure warts/get pregnant/grow hair/lose weight/attract warthogs/whatever.

Click HERE to start your FREE download

Now what’s all that about?. Well, people who can think of no constructive way to spend their time have discovered that if you give someone something that they never particularly wanted, and maybe have never even heard of, they feel under an obligation to you. So it’s easier to flog them something else that they didn’t really want. (or persuade them to contribute to some worthy – or even worthless – cause). It’s a cloying flavour that is extremely hard to get rid of.

• The ‘Good Life’:

With our help you can do this standing on one leg in the shower and drinking pints of the vintage Champagne that you’ll quaffing all day and every day in the new lifestyle that you’ll be enjoying thanks to our training.

I particularly enjoy this flavour. The subtle blending of Greed and Lust, enhanced by the piquant hint of Near Idleness taunts the taste buds erotically. It is used freely in the main course of all efforts to spruik ‘Get-Rich-Quick with Little Effort’ schemes

• The ‘Get Rid of that Beastly Boss/Stop Working to make Someone Else Rich’:

May be used to flavour an Aperitif or a Dessert. An earthy flavour, appealing to those who consider themselves unappreciated and/or downtrodden.

Like ‘The Good Life’ this is often used to disguise the underlying taste of Ripoff in ‘Work From Home and Make a Fortune Whilst Effortlessly Child Rearing and Crafting You Best Selling Novel and needing No Capital Outlay’ dishes.

Before moving on to consider the flavours of Bullshit used to tempt the appetite for goods and services I will illustrate just two of the anomalies in the promotion of training schemes that the keen student may note over a sustained period of observation.

The following examples are loosely based on real communications that I have received.

Anomaly #1. Promoting a Course of Training:

With our tuition you will soon find yourself able to afford the lifestyle of your dreams, working only a few chosen hours a day, relaxing in your own home or garden and enjoying your hobbies.

Contrast with (in a later email):

‘Our renowned expert, Fred Bloggs, will teach you all you need to know for a fraction of what he normally charges on the rare occasions when he is willing to give lessons. For he normally sits at his desk 16 hours a day, 350 days a year, so devoted is he to his work.’

Now, is Fred utterly incompetent or simply the greediest bastard that you ever encountered?

Either way he isn’t cruising along easily at home, pulling in a small fortune with negligible effort and enjoying heaps of spare time in which to bath the dog and collect rare porcelain. I’d expect him to be tired and irritable and his wife and kids probably left him years ago.

Anomaly #2. Revealing the Charm of Work at Home.

‘Here we reveal the virtues of working at home, as illustrated by a case study of our former student Ms Anna Purna’.

Case study gives glowing details of Child, Dog, Husband, Culinary Skills and Overseas Vacations:

Contrast with (in a later email):

‘Ms Purna has joined us as a valued member of our permanent office staff and will be available to respond to your queries six days a week between the hours of 8.30 am and 6 pm.’

Now how did the Home Lotus Eating Life lose its charm so quickly? Why is Anna now slaving to make a fortune for Beastly Boss whilst accepting a relative pittance for her own time? Isn’t this exactly what Beastly Boss’s company is training people to escape from? They told us that Anna HAD escaped, and it WAS good. Could they have LIED? Surely not!

And what of Child, Dog and Husband; abandoned to survive on takeaway food and deprived of their luxury holidays?

I leave it as an exercise for the student to collect and analyse other such conflicts. Study material is easy to obtain; I myself have some 800 such emails, unread, that have accrued over a few months when I have lacked the time to distract myself with such trivia.

43

Not what I intended for this blog but I seem to have strayed into the realm of pure Bullshit so I will share that with you.

I was looking for information on Nicola Tesla. You may not have heard of Tesla or know little about him. This is not surprising given the way his life and achievements have been largely ignored or actively suppressed.

Yet you would not be reading this, nor living in the advanced society that so many of us take for granted, without his work.

There is an excellent video about Tesla in which it becomes clear that every – not most, every – development in electrical power generation and use, broadcasting and other forms of communication – such as this – are wholly dependent on, and stem directly from, his discoveries.

One of my favourite sayings, sometimes attributed to Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, goes like this

Men have two opposing pairs of basic attributes, cleverness and stupidity, energy and idleness. How these are combined in the individual determine his usefulness in society, as follows:

Stupid and Idle: Useful for menial tasks.

Clever and Energetic: Suited to hands-on, constructive activity and middle management.

Clever and Idle: Ideal in top management positions, capable of highest thinking and undistracted by mundane activities.

Stupid and Energetic Lethally dangerous, apt to act without thought of consequence and hazard to others. Must be harshly repressed.

I have seen it presented more elegantly but that is the gist of it. Unfortunately it takes no cognisance of greed and dishonesty; motivators of consequence in all societies and of significance in the Tesla story. That story is well explained in this slightly over-dramatised video, courtesy of the BBC and CBS.

It does touch upon our topic of Bullshit to the degree that Edison – stupid but extremely industrious – employed all sorts of Bullshit to justify his adherence to direct current electricity, even though he had Tesla in his employ willing and even eager to share with him the knowledge and understanding of how electrical power MUST be alternating if it were to develop its full potential. Yet it was Edison who, by a combination of frenzied industry, often sleeping for only a few hours on one of his laboratory benches, greed and dishonesty, secured a place in history. Tesla, cheated and ignored, moved on.

I could continue to wax indignant at Tesla’s treatment but our subject is Bullshit and I must return to that, pausing only to acknowledge the debt of gratitude that we all owe to George Westinghouse who, despite active interference from Edison, .backed Tesla to bring us the extraordinary benefits of alternating current electricity that we take entirely for granted today. (Ironically carried to much of the USA today by Consolidated Edison!)

The next Bullshitmeister I wish to introduce is Marconi. Not only did Marconi’s entire success rest upon Tesla’s patents but he managed to Bullshit the US Patents Office to reassign those patents to him; a travesty only reversed years after Tesla’s death in poverty. Marconi was far too stupid to know what he was doing but industrious enough to get it to work, extremely crudely. It helped that he had private means sufficient to fund his attempts and render it unnecessary for him to engage in gainful employment.

But the treat that I have saved for last is a second video that I had hoped might present further information about Tesla’s life and discoveries. I give the narrator full marks for industriousness; the stupidity speaks for itself. I shudder at the effect it may have on people unconversant with electrical principles, yet the narrator seems honestly to imagine that his stream of irrational and erratic description will help the uninitiated to grasp a basic concept.

As an example of pure, disinterested Bullshit it would be hard to surpass. He narrator is not trying to impress, neither is he selling anything. He is simply blundering through a morass of ineptitude and confusion under the impression that he is saying something significant for the benefit of others.

The repetitive and entirely disconnected stream of Tesla quotations and news items that accompany the monologue, often too briefly shown to be read in their entirety, form, I think, the ‘Piece de Resistance’ of this truly outstanding performance.

This is Bullshit so powerful that I was unable to continue listening beyond half way through the video, and to get even that far took exceptional self-control. Please, if you begin to feel impelled to scream and tear out your hair, stop the video at once. It is no part of my intention to subject you to harm, even though we must pursue the path of truth boldly, undeterred by personal danger.

I suggest that when starting the video you be accompanied by a sturdy companion, who can prevent you from over-indulgence and soothe your nerves after this stressful experience.

WARNING This video is unsuitable for persons with an extreme devotion to rationality, clarity and accuracy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ7Jv_re5EQ

44

Hi there fan – if you exist. Oh! What the hell. Hi there anyway.

I read all sorts of blogs and I am amazed by the industry with which those people churn them out. Even the ones who are just doing it for the money are working like slaves to get it and those apparently doing it for no reward are quite extraordinary. I salute them.

But I can’t summon that much energy. For a while I thought that people were fighting back against the ingrained politico/legal system and that encouraged me to comment on it. Exploiting the crack-brained (or cunningly created, depending on your interpretation) Australian electoral system to insert some people into the system who were ‘Not one of Us’ seemed a major breakthrough.

Then it all seemed to stall; I lost heart and stopped blogging.

But the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the USA was surely a similar breakthrough. It doesn’t matter whether or not you like the Donald or his policies or actions,; clearly he is ‘Not One of Them’. Not a politician. Not lawyer. How many virtues can you ask for in one man?

True, he is a billionaire. There is no other way to become President without being beholden to those who stake you. And even then he will have had to make deals with unsavoury people in order to persuade them not to undermine his campaign. But he went out and said ‘Vote for me and not for one of the self-selected superiors who are urging you to vote for them.’ And he succeeded.

What his supporters said, and said emphatically, was ‘We don’t know about you but we can’t do any worse than elect you. Not one of those other bastards has any interest in us or in our needs and hopes’.

And that is exactly the case with the majority of those who rise scum like to the top of the Australian political scene. They are in it together for themselves; none of them give a damn about us.

If I were in any doubt that a cabal exists at the top of Australian politics – across the entire political spectrum – it would be swept aside by observing the way in which the most dismal, ineffective, questionably honest, and downright crooked politicians are given a stream of lucrative sinecures the moment they are removed from office. (And yes, I do note that there are also spectacular examples of this in the UK, where the most dismal and damaging politicians step unhesitatingly across into the European Parliament and continue their pointless and harmful activities at considerable public expense. People whom Nigel Farrage so aptly described, to their faces, as having never done a day’s honest work in their lives.) A large number of people in the UK woke up to that fact. Unfortunately we have no Brexit equivalent to save Australia.

Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians had to show evidence of having done an honest day’s work – better still about five years of it – before being allowed to stand for office. And what about Ministers? Are they required to have any qualifications? No! If you needed a major operation would you like your surgeon to be chosen for his popularity with people in the street and not worry about whether he had any training and knowledge specifically relevant to his profession? No? Then why should a Minister not be required to show an equivalent level of qualification for his position? These politicians make decisions that have a major impact on the lives of tens of thousands of people. And they are ALWAYS members of a major party who cosy up to the party leader and make deals to gain their positions. But there is no requirement for them to demonstrate ANY degree of competence.

But now I am being drawn into a counsel of perfection. It is a step much too far. Back to reality then.

Western Australia had the opportunity to buck the trend; to give the major parties a major thrashing and start some real change in Australian politics. And they threw it away. They handed their State over to the tired old hacks of broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. They already have a stunning debt and broken infrastructure. Now they are heading for an infinitely worse debt that will be incurred to finance broken promises and subtly enrich certain politicians in ways that will never be declared dishonest but never shown to be honest either. At least, that is what history indicates will be the case. They may, I suppose, invent the flying pig, but I think the voters have been most unwise to bet so strongly on the likelihood of it.

Once upon a time people simply rebelled – blood in the streets, public guillotining, you know the sort of thing. Except for people whom we daren’t identify for fear of laws that our political masters have enacted to protect themselves, most of us don’t want to return to that system. But the system that we have in place is destroying itself. It puts power into the hands of greedy and irresponsible people and their increasing greed is only matched by their increasing lack of concern for the fate or actions of the majority of humanity.

But we don’t believe it. We don’t want to believe it, so we say it isn’t really so. But the world in which anyone could do an honest day’s work, if they tried hard and long enough to find the opportunity, is vanishing. Automation and communication are making us redundant.

Already there is talk of a minimum wage for everyone. Why? So that they can buy the things that the owners of the robotic, automated, factories of the near future create. For when most of us are starving and living in the street, where are those owners to get their fortunes from?

But wait! Why can’t they just share the things they make between themselves – especially when they make things that do all of the cleaning and repairing that people now do? Well of course they can. We are then just garbage. Why pay us at all? Just send in the robot disposal units.

The politicians that we have are either driving us down that path or simply stumbling mindlessly down it themselves. Perhaps the people who want to kill us for not sharing their beliefs are just saving us from a worse fate. But can they save themselves? Just possibly. Perhaps a return to barbarism is, after all, the lesser evil.

Well I have just read through all of that and if you have too I thank you for your patience and tenacity. I apologise for the curious variation in text size; I don’tknow what has caused it and can find no way to correct it. And now it is very late and I am too tired to do more. It is as it is.

 

A Child’s (or Politician’s) Guide to eliminating, or at least curbing, the rorting of customers by ‘financial institutions’ – or indeed by anyone else.

1. Create a database to contain details of every reported rort.

2. Publicise the existence of the database and it’s purpose.

3. Create an app, so that people can easily lodge the details of how they have been rorted.

4. Provide an address and phone number for less savvy people to use.

5. Employ a trained, energetic and intelligent staff to investigate ALL reports thoroughly.

6. Prosecute in ALL cases where there has clearly been rorting.

7. Pay for all of this by MASSIVE fines on rorters – not on companies; not on institutions; on individuals responsible for the rorts and paricularly on individual managers who apply pressure on their staffs to obtain sales ‘at all costs’.

I was inspired to write that by reports of the outcome of the recent Royal Commission, which stated that ‘The Banks’ will be required to pay vast sums to pay for armies of lawyers to be engaged in the prosecution – and no doubt defence – of….Well that is where it gets fuzzy. ‘The Banks’ themselves? ‘Banks’ don’t make decisions; people make decisions. ‘Banks’ don’t pressure employees; people in banks apply that pressure. And now we hear of mobile phone company employees persuading people to sign up for commitments that they can’t possibly meet and who in some cases are already hopelessly in debt. Someone in those companies is making a mint and it isn’t the poor bloody salesman. Find them and TAKE AWAY THEIR MONEY. ALL OF IT, in extreme cases and a great deal in lesser ones.

Now let’s move on.

As elections approach ‘Pork Barrels’ of increasing size and variety are appearing. “We are going to spend (insert stupidly large amount) on giving you…’ Note; They are going to give Us.

But ‘They’ don’t have that much money and wouldn’t spend it on anyone but themselves if they had.

I am not a fan of ‘political correctness’ in its usual context of having to hide your perfectly valid opinion or feelings behind some mealy-mouthed drivel to avoid offending people who can tolerate no-one’s opinions but their own. However, correct use of language by politicians would be refreshing. eg.

‘We will be taking umpty-squillions of dollars from you in taxes to spend partly on providing this dubious and ill-defined ‘benefit’ but mostly to grease the palms of our family and associates.’ (And a lot of lawyers, of course.)

Now I know that some of you (if there are more than one of you) will feel this to be extreme. But the plain truth is that ALL of the money that politicians spend IS collected from us in the first place and if they ARE in fact spending – or proposing to spend – some of it in a way that might benefit us IT IS NO MORE THAN WHAT THEY ARE BEING PAID HANDSOMELY TO DO.

The fact that they expect us to be delighted by this should make us at least curious about the vast other sums that they collect and spend in ways most UNLIKELY to earn our delight. In fact I can see no reason why the government should not be required to publish its balance sheet – nailed to a post in the Internet perhaps – for us, the owners, to examine. Yes, however inept, bovine or plain dishonest they may be they are OUR government – wholly owned and PAID FOR by us. And it’s about time we made that clear.

Dear reader – assuming that there be such a person – I realise that you are probably even more bored with this than I am, so I’ll keep it brief.

Question: What is the purpose of a ‘Royal Commission”?

Answer: To enrich an astounding number of lawyers.

Question: How is this?

Answer: Well a lawyer is appointed to mastermind the proceedings.

‘Counsel assisting’ are appointed to , well , assist.

Those appearing before the commission engage the most expensive lawyers that they – or more probably their customers and shareholders – can afford.

The bodies charged with overseeing the activities being investigated – and found deficient in the discharge of their responsibilities – are awarded extra public funds to pay more lawyers to act in the prosecution of those few underlings with insufficient political clout to avoid it.

Those prosecuted pay lawyers as much of their customers’ and shareholders’ funds as they can get their hands on, plus as much of their own cash as they deem prudent to avoid incarceration.

The glacial pace of prosecution causes public unrest and this is met by the expenditure of more public funds to build more courtrooms to provide more space for more lawyers – and bear in mind that all judges are simply inflated lawyers – to rack up more fees and costs.

So, at the end of the day, whatever the apparent outcome, and however much helpless shareholders and the general public are fleeced in the process, many, many lawyers will make a great deal of money.

And the world will go on much as before.

 

On the subject of the legal profession this becomes more the Blog of Disgust.

Thinking about the relationships between Members of Parliament, the Judiciary and the Public it strikes me as disgusting that a person elected to office by several thousands – or millions – of people can be dismissed from that office by a single judge, or even group of judges, regardless of the wishes of those electors. Surely this should only be possible if the elected person has been proved to have committed a serious, criminal act. The longer I live the more I am astounded at the way a handful of members of the legal profession have managed to insinuate themselves into positions of overwhelming power over the rest of us.

We see the same arrogant disregard for the wishes of the electorate in the USA. First the absurd attempts to declare a Russian plot to ensure Donald Trump’s election as President, when as the only credible alternative to Hillary Clinton his election was inevitable. And now more legal skulduggery about trivial events that may or may not have taken place in his private life.

I don’t claim to know whether Donald Trump is a good president; what I do know is that a bunch of lawyers and other individuals in privileged positions are trying to overturn the decision of millions of American citizens on flimsy and insubstantial grounds.

How many people in the USA have said ‘I wouldn’t have voted for him if I’d known that’? About the same number as would have said ‘Oo I wouldn’t have voted for Barnaby Joyce if I’d known that he could have qualified for New Zealand citizenship had he ever wanted to’. I strongly suspect that the answer in both cases would be ‘None’. Even if I’m wrong, I’m certain the the number would be too negligible to have affected the result of either election.

The legal profession should focus its attention on those who seek to rob or swindle citizens, or cause them harm. And the degree to which it does so should be proportional to the magnitude and frequency of the offences. Playing about with bits of the constitution that have no real, practical significance, whilst acquiring handsome remuneration from the public purse, might in itself be regarded as dishonesty, particularly when we are told that the courts in general are incapable of trying cases promptly and expediently.

Of course if an elected person is found or suspected to have acted in a criminal manner they should be treated in exactly the same way as any other citizen in similar circumstances. But they aren’t. Unless they are an Independent or too low in the party hierarchy to matter. We know for a fact that in Australia you can break someone’s arm and go unpunished if you have enough political clout. You can even be touted as Prime Minister.

I do find it distressing that any elector – or indeed anyone at all – should consider such a person suitable to gain or retain any public office. But for the purposes of this blog we will continue to suppose that the will of the public – even as distorted through a Byzantine electoral system such as ours – is the best hope of achieving some semblance of fair and responsible government.

I conclude that the legal profession is on the whole of no better value to the public than are professional politicians. Both are masters of obfuscation and misdirection, bleeding the public dry to provide excessive remuneration for little value in return – instead, acting out a complicated charade to shore up their own pretended importance.

If you are trying to be an honest politician, or lawyer, I thank you for your efforts and have no wish to denigrate you. But you will also know that you have no chance of penetrating the citadels of the people I am talking about.

I think I mentioned tumbrels before somewhere.

I just discovered the draft of this, which I had obviously intended to publish earlier but had then forgotten, probably due to the Great Phone Fiasco. It doesn’t fit in here particularly well but it’s all part of my attempt to document the farcical aspects of our political system here in Australia.  Regrettably, it seems relevant to all of those countries such as the UK and the USA that have their roots in the ‘Westminster’ system.

You will already know that I believe that the legal profession, in its present form, generally causes more harm than good. Its practitioners should, therefore, be banned absolutely from positions in government at all levels. People should choose; acceptance at the bar should automatically incur a lifetime ban from parliamentary service.

I think that some justification for this view is needed.

We already know that ‘justice’ goes in general to those with the deepest pockets. It is absurd to suggest that, as in the current Australian banking fiasco, people would pay ludicrous sums to certain barristers unless they felt that their chances of a favourable outcome under the law were thereby significantly enhanced.

And I am aware of at least one scandalous incident in which a company in the UK was bankrupted by the cost of defending its patented processes from being flagrantly copied by its richer competitor – who could afford to string out the proceedings by a series of legal delaying tactics and thus escaped any penalty and was able to buy the assets of the complainant company – including its patents – for a derisive sum.

That is not justice.

In criminal law, once again in the UK, some time ago – just after the ‘Age of Discrimination’ (when that word still meant informed, sensible choice and had not had its meaning bastardised to indicate some derogatory action) had just been lowered from 21 years to 18 – two young men aged 16 and 18 were caught by a police officer on a rooftop where they ought not to have been.

The 16 year old produced a gun; shot and killed the policeman. But he was a minor, so could not be sentenced to capital punishment. The 18 year old, who had harmed no one and may not have even known that the other had a gun, was now not a minor (though a few weeks earlier he and anyone else less than 21 years old would have been considered one) so they hanged him.

No one who is interested in justice could possibly condone such an outcome. It was not justice, it was spite. I am quite sure that there are many similar cases to those described above, in both civil and criminal law.

There is NO requirement in either English nor Australian law that justice shall supersede legal process. This situation can only have been created by the actions of the lawyers and will never be corrected until government decisions are taken without interference from the legal profession.

In times past, when people came before the King at the King’s Bench they did not ask for a legally approved decision, they asked for justice. Justice does not seem to play a significant role in the present Australian legal system – nor in that of any ‘western’ nation.

Too little weight is given to intention and too much to outcome.

In cases involving death or injury the desire for revenge often looms larger than considerations of whether the perpetrator intended harm, or could have reasonably foreseen that his, her, or their actions would result in harm. In a recent case someone was jailed for 2 years for being momentarily inattentive. He was driving; glanced down at his navigation screen; and missed a ‘give way’ sign. The resulting accident caused deaths and the relatives of the victims screamed for him to be punished more harshly. That is understandable because of their grief. It is totally irrational in view of the action that caused the deaths. In fact the jail term is grossly excessive.

Anyone who drives and claims never to have made a mistake is either too stupid to know when they have done so, or a liar. And the liar is the safer of the two; he or she may learn how to avoid that mistake in future. Intelligent people are just grateful that luck or the quick actions of other road users has saved them from the possible consequences of their inevitable mistakes.

The courts have some strange ideas. Learner drivers are required to display ‘L’ plates conspicuously, so that other drivers may make allowance for their lack of skill and experience. Yet I recall a case where a driver collided with the rear of an ‘L plated car when the learner driver stopped for an amber traffic light (they are NOT ‘orange’ and I refuse to call them that). The non-learner claimed that the accident was caused by the fact that an experienced driver would not have stopped so soon after the light changed. And the magistrates apparently agreed! Why? The whole point of ‘L’ plates is that experienced drivers should allow plenty or room for the learner to make mistakes – or in this case to obey a law that is disregarded by many experienced drivers. No justice there.

Yet we see reports of lawyers and lawmakers discussing special penalties for ‘one-punch’ crimes. If you deliberately cause harm by punching someone what on earth does the number of punches matter? The deliberate intention is to cause harm and harm has been caused. We might allow for the fact that someone throws a punch that could not possibly cause significant injury but in the case of a deliberate, full blooded swipe at some one the punishment should be severe. Whether the injured person dies or is simply injured is a matter of chance. The punishment should not be.

Of course, in the past when someone was badly injured by a deliberate assault the police would wait eagerly to see if the victim died, because then they could get the aggressor hanged for murder. If the victim lived – no matter how grievous the injuries or permanent the harm – the aggressor would only face a lesser charge. Luck is not an appropriate factor where justice is the aim.

I think that before being qualified to vote, every citizen should be required to attend a number of court proceedings and be an observer at several jury deliberations. Both of these experiences are enlightening, though depressing to anyone who thought that rational reasoning and attention to facts carried much weight in such activities. This experience might make people realise how little the outcome of any legal process depends on fact and fairness and how much on prejudice and greed.

I am tempted to suggest that every convicted person should have the right to appeal to a random body of people who are neither lawyers nor politicians, with the question ‘Is this a just outcome?’ And for their conviction to be negated if the answer is ‘No’. Unfortunately my own observations in courtrooms and on jury service have left me with little confidence in the ability or desire of the general public to produce a rational response to that question, based solely on the evidence presented.

Another thing that concerns me is the disconnect between stipulated punishment and actuality. A stipulated punishment might be a number of years’ imprisonment. The actuality will also include subsequent branding for life as an ‘ex-con’, subject to police suspicion and interference and suffering detriment to his or her employment prospects.

I suppose that if you are a particularly saintly person you may think this not unreasonable. If, like most of us, you have ‘sailed close to the wind’ and got away with it – perhaps performed some act that you know to be dishonest although not technically illegal or maybe illegal but unprovable, you ought to admit that those people are no worse than you and and should not be hampered in their subsequent lives in that way.

Another indefensible stupidity is the way in which ‘companies’ are punished for breaking the law – on the rare occasions when they are. Companies don’t make decisions; people within companies make decisions. Companies do not take actions; people within companies take actions. If those decisions or those actions result in monies to which it is not entitled flowing into the company, the people taking those decisions or performing those actions are behaving dishonestly and should be regarded in the same light as a person who robs a store or steals your wallet. Oh, sometimes a few heads roll, but they are generally people who have made so much money out of the business that they really don’t need any more, and usually they slide unnoticed into some equally lucrative post elsewhere.

On the rare occasions when such dishonesty is revealed it is the shareholders who are really punished and, except in the case where ownership of a large number of shares is concentrated in few hands, they have no means of controlling the miscreants and probably no knowledge of their shonky dealings. Yet neither politicians nor the legal profession are interested in correcting this stupidity and putting the people who really deserve it behind bars or, better still, imposing really substantial fines on them.

So, remove the lawyers from politics and the lawmakers will be able to make laws that protect our safety and our money, without any complicated legal gobbledegook designed to enrich lawyers and protect cheap crooks.

We could, incidentally, save an enormous amount of money this way. Any instance in which there was no obvious intention to defraud or cause deliberate harm should be dismissed at a summary hearing of the allegations, with no more than a caution to take care to avoid any repetition of the alleged offence – provided that immediate restitution of improperly obtained funds had been made or costs of any damage or treatment met.

And NOBODY should have their claims fail because their opponent can afford to pay higher fees or extend the time taken to try a case by causing technical delays. Indeed, any lawyer seen to be trying to ‘bend’ the law in favour of a client should be promptly disbarred from practising law.

It’s another fairy tale of course. Very few people are interested in justice or fairness. Otherwise they would be screaming in their thousands against the present flagrant disregard for both, by all sides of politics. But getting the lawyers out of parliament would be a good start.

A Wealth of Despair

Well the name of this website was originally a joke, referring to my despair over the ludicrous performance that I went through to transfer my email service to a new provider. Especially as I found out afterwards that I need not have done most of it.

And I could relate that name also to the struggle that it took to recover the use of my mobile phone – blocked accidentally – my despairing appeals for help disregarded by Google, Samsung, and the supplier, Kogan. I won’t bore you with the details of what I did during the TWO MONTHS that it has just taken me to find a solution – but you can be damn sure that neither Google, nor Samsung, nor Kogan will ever see another cent of my money.

But I do like to comment on the governance of our lives by those who apparently assume that they are superior beings, placed on earth to rule us. And anyone who is following Australian politics today will understand my despair of both the sanity and the worth of those beings.

I had meant to resume developing my thesis about the failure of politics in a general sense. I hardly expected those morons to present me with a tailor made case study – but they have.

I long ago gave up voting for any party. Voting for parties is first mistake we make. And I have come to realise that the whole problem with politics consists to just two factors.

1. The ridiculous shortness for the period for which we elect people – so that they can neither achieve much nor are they there to take the responsibility for the results of their actions.

2. The existence of the professional politician. This person MUST get elected – and re-elected – in order to have a job, and therefore an income. Being only human, they will therefore do or say anything at all that will increase the likelihood of that happening.

This is exacerbated by the party system, whereby gaining the party nomination for a seat hugely increases the likelihood of election but requires slavish obedience to so called ‘power brokers’ within that party.

Nobody in politics gives a damn about what you or I may want; unless there is some chance of profit or preferment coming their way as a result of doing what we would like. Worse still, many of those with power see it only as a means of furthering their own ambitions and increasing their wealth, with complete disregard for the good of the nation.

What we have seen today in Australia is someone who sees a chance at the top job – with its attendant lifetime perks – and is prepared to divide his party and destroy the credibility of the Prime Minister and his government in order to grab it.

Never mind that policies and legislation of crucial importance to the rest of us get kicked into the dustbin and we’ll probably end up with the utterly disastrous opposition party winning the next election and plunging us back into the dark ages, as we are milked to pay off its supporters. All he can see is the laurel wreath descending on his brow and the loot flowing into his offshore bank account.

Or so I suppose.

We really do have the most uninspiring bunch vying to ‘lead’ this country. Most of them couldn’t lead a broken down horse to the knacker’s yard.

John Howard was the last Prime Minister to survive a ‘full term’ of 3 years. (I have already given my view of the inadequacy of such a term.) His most notable achievement was to destroy the prospect of a Republic by a cunningly worded referendum on the subject.

I forget the precise wording but the referendum in effect asked ‘Do you want a Republic with a President chosen by me?’ Not much chance of a ‘yes’ response to that one. I think we all knew who that would be.

Then we had Kevin Rudd.

Macbeth ponders ‘Would there were an art to see the mind’s construction in the face’.

Well in my opinion it was all there in ole Kev’s face for anyone to see. Arrogant, Peevish, Petty, Aggressive, Intolerant – well I guess they are all facets of the same thing. Selfishness.

And didn’t he prove it!

Dumped when his arrogance and incompetence became too much for even his supporters to bear, he devoted all of his undoubted energy into destroying the work of the far better person who took his place and then succeeded in acquiring the opportunity to add to his previous disasters.

(He was of course then shuffled off into a sinecure where he continues to thrive at considerable public expense – or so I believe.)

And so we received a Liberal/National party coalition government.

And they set out to show that they could behave as dysfunctionally as the opposition.

Finally we were given Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister – the nearest thing to a sane man that I have ever encountered in politics. (Well there was Winston Churchill but he was before I was quite old enough to vote.)

And the bloody imbeciles in the coalition are about to destroy Turnbull and so hand over government to the disastrous Bill Shorten and the Labor Party. (Yes, I can spell – they can’t.)

Now I don’t know who looks the most ludicrous in a high-visibility vest and a hard hat, Bill Shorten or Gina Reinhart, but I could easily imagine either of them as a concentration camp commandant. Gina however appears, according to reports in the press, to be a threat only to anyone whose money she thinks she has a chance to get her hands on. Bill is a threat to our survival as a nation – or at least as a nation able to live above subsistence level in a competitive world.

And all this is unlikely to change as long as government is in the hands of political parties, because it is obviously in their interests to maintain the current system. The first thing therefore is NOT to vote for party members. This may result in a few oddballs getting into parliament but we have to hope that, in time, responsible people will see a prospect of being elected and come forward.

Then we can elect a parliament for, say, 10 years, at the end of which time half the members will return to live in the society that they have created. They will have the same superannuation entitlements as any other working person and nothing else, whatever their ministerial rank.

We will elect replacements for those who have departed and these will serve for 10 years. In five years time the remainder of the original members will retire and their replacements will serve for 10 years. Now we will have a parliament of people who have 10 years in which to achieve something and absolutely no incentive to court popularity. And there will always be continuity of half the parliament.

The creation of the actual government will be the responsibility of the parliament and they won’t be able to blame their bad decisions on the electorate.

There was something like it, centuries ago, where capable people came forward and took their share of responsibility for the affairs of the nation for a period, before returning to their private lives.

It was later referred to as Democracy. Few words have suffered greater abuse – and few, if any, politicians can even grasp the concept. To the Left of politics it is of course totally incomprehensible.

Ain’t gonna happen is it!

Well if all we can do is tinker with the existing system there are still some worthwhile patches we could put on it.

Apparently the author of the present lunacy has been feathering his nest with a good slice of commonwealth funding, via a child care business owned by himself and his wife – or so it seems from news reports. ($5,000,000 was mentioned.) Now the Supreme Court is going to pronounce on whether this is naughty enough to make him ineligible to hold a seat in Parliament. The Supreme Court should have less obvious concerns to occupy its time. I won’t start on the inanities of lawyers and courts or we’ll be here all day.

Making it a criminal offence for any Member of Parliament to receive any form of payment other than his Parliamentary Salary and approved expenses would be a good patch to start with.

(Yet I recall that some time ago a young MP drew an overnight lodging allowance and paid it to his mother – with whom he stayed the night, He was promptly hounded out of politics altogether for that. Why, for God’s sake? The allowance for for lodging; he lodged at his mother’s home. I expect that, like most mothers, she immediately spent the lot in the local economy, laying on special meals and treats for him. That to me is MY money being well spent. Handouts to people who have the power to influence the handout process stink.)

Another of our problems is that, although we are technically and legally a Monarchy, our de-facto head of state is the Prime Minister. It is the Prime Minister who represents us at the highest level meetings Internationally but WE DON”T ELECT HIM OR HER as Prime Minister – we simply assume that the leader of the party which forms government will become Prime Minister. And even if that person is given the post, that party, as we have seen all too often recently, can remove him or her from it whenever they please – and substitute anyone they please, regardless of that person’s ability or suitability to lead the nation..

That seems a good case for a Republic – but which Republic do you see as a shining example for us to follow? The USA would seem to be the best model as far as the maintenance of a semblance of democracy goes but many people might be inclined to reconsider that in the light of recent events there. And we are very small. But we now have 25,000,000 population – WOW! Yeah, right! That’d be about two thirds of the number of people living in Tokyo or maybe half the number in Mexico City. We should model on somewhere small then – Haiti? Cuba? The Phillipines? plenty to choose from.

I doubt whether it matters. Any system is only as good as the people in it and I can only surmise that most of my fellow Australians feel that our present, crackbrained system of 9 governments – 6 State, 2 Territory, and one Federal – to rule two thirds of the population of Tokyo – is the best in the world and cannot be improved. Apparently they have no concerns about a system whereby some portion of their vote, if their chosen candidate is unsuccessful, can be passed on to some third party not of their choice – apparently in order that control of the nation always remains in the hands of one of two anointed political parties. This is the so-called ‘Two Party Preferred’ system and recent events have shown us exactly what there is to choose between our two preferred parties.

Perhaps there is hope. If both major parties continue their current antics even the Australian public could perhaps begin to see that an alternative arrangement might be an improvement. Some comments heard on the radio give me hope – but others show a number of people so stuck in the mud of their fixed opinions – or wedded to the furtherance of their own greed and to hell with all else – that change in my lifetime is extremely unlikely.

For some time now I have had things of greater value than politics to occupy my time and my thoughts. When I began to write this I was reacting angrily to current events and did not look back at my earlier posts; as a result, some of the above is simply a repetition of the points made in those. For that I apologise; yet I suppose it does indicate a consistency in my thoughts and feelings on the rather loathsome topic of politics in general.

In Gilbert and Sullvan’s ‘Iolanthe’ they sing that for the past 20 years ‘The House of Peers did nothing much, and did it very well’. It is a policy that many governments would do well to adopt. Most people can adapt perfectly well to stability, whatever its nature. Constant mindless tinkering and disruption cause immeasurable harm, filling people’s lives with worry and uncertainty.

I forgot to vote last Saturday, so I am expecting arrest by the Australian Political Police at any moment. We are legally beholden to vote here in Australia – well, no thinking person would want to  spend time going to the polling station to vote for most of the no-hopers who present themselves for election here unless forced to.

However, I wanted to vote, for what little good it might do, and am very annoyed with myself for forgetting. But there is nothing I can do about it now. Why did none of the idiots who pestered us over the phone for weeks, with their wretched polls and political messages, do something as useful as phone us on polling day with a reminder to vote?

Not that I could have influenced the final result. Unfortunately we have new generations of voters who are unaware of the disastrous results of voting for the Liberal party in the past. Or perhaps they don’t believe it could happen again – just like they know that the tooth fairy exists.

For the record, about 20 years ago we – for I was one of the idiots who voted for them – gave the Liberal party in South Australia such a huge majority that the Labor party should have become an historical footnote. Then the Liberals discarded Premier Dean Brown, inserted John Olsen into a ‘safe’ seat and established him as Premier.

Olsen had slunk away into the Senate in a snit when the voters had previously rejected him and only came crawling back when he saw that the Liberals were on a roll. He later reportedly lied to a judicial enquiry about questionable deals that he was involved in – although he escaped prosecution, as major politicians invariably do – and resigned in disgrace; leaving behind him a bankrupt State in chaos.

(To be strictly accurate, the bankruptcy was a legacy of Tim Marcus Clark who, during the preceding Labor government, ran the State Bank into the ground, somehow escaped paying all but a trivial amount of the damages for which he was liable (and most of THAT was paid by his wife) and retired to live out his days in luxury in Sydney. Another fine Liberal no doubt.)

The Labor Party that inherited this mess were not people for whom I would vote; yet for the past 16 years they have struggled against odds to put things right and have done a pretty good job of it. They have been forward looking, embracing alternative energy sources and reducing our reliance on power transmitted from other States. They have fought to gain manufacturing and shipbuilding opportunities for South Australia and to improve the quality of our education system and hospitals.

Now we have a Premier whose stated ambition seems to be to lead us back into the beginning of the previous century, with our electricity derived from coal-fired, outdated, polluting, power stations located in other States. We were World leaders in innovation for a brief moment; now that’s apparently being thrown away. Perhaps a previous career in daddy’s furniture manufacturing business does little to develop ambitious dreams and broad horizons.

I don’t suppose he will do the sort of shonky dealing that Olsen reputedly engaged in; I doubt that he has the initiative. So, unless we are fortunate enough to experience some major crisis, we have four years of tedium and stagnation to look forward to.

Sometimes I have a yearning for tumbrils.