An Amiable Fool
*
Free advice is worth the price.
Robert Half
No one can be right all of the time, but it helps to be right most of the time.
Robert Half
What happens when the future has come and gone?
Robert Half
All is not lost. We don't come skittering down through the high valleys seeking escape, we don't find old capped out village houses in which to hide. Those secret alcoves and hideaway spots we have always sought are not well, are not welcome, have diversified out of his life and taken on other forms. Crackling beasts forming out of air, serious soldiers entering the debate for the first time, the clash of swords in medieval fighting, all of it offered a pathway to a new life; to return to his own village, his wife, his children, his family, his grandmother crouched on the house steps, watching the children play.
He had once been one of those children; until the inexorable forces of growth and nature took him away from the place he had loved so much, the place where he thought he would always be. Growing up, he could never imagined there was anywhere else. This beautiful place, these people, he thought that was the entire universe. They had run and played in the spring meadows, without a care. How resonant that phrase now seemed: "without a care".
The fighting had be4en harsh, and he felt guilty at the blood on his hands, even though it had been a noble fight - he had protected his village, his clan's honour. The warrior caste, they called him, part of the warrior caste that protected their village, their honour, their people, their culture, their traditions. The smoke pouring from old fires. The beautifully made houses, made to withstand the harshest of winters. All these race memories filtered through into an entirely different era, an era of soft options and motor cars, crowded cities and common compromises.
Because there had been so little to believe in, and that which he had believed had turned out to be entirely wrong, he found himself longing for a simpler time, when rights and wrongs were mapped out like black and white on a chequer board, and there was no doubt. A world where machines did not dominate everything they did. Where there was nobility in action and labour, not just in those days preparing for battle and there determined, and successful, attempts to defend the village. But the days when he was assigned to work in the fields, to dig trenches and bring in the harvest.
How beautiful the women had been, way back then, how uncomplicated his lust. Now the women were drunk with power and obsessed with petty injustices allegedly perpetrated against them, when in fact the warrior caste had protected them for centuries. Everything had been turned upside down, in this strange modern place. It was impossible to imagine what could have been. He didn't know where these strange entities came from, moving in and out of his consciousness, forming their own identity. He couldn't work out what they were, past entities, strange spirits?
But whoever they were, it was a crowded place, different entities inhabiting him every day. The old maid from Tambar was fading now, bustling off to look after her house, mind the chooks, gloat over having the best house in the village. Gloat in the sunlight as it hit the splendid purple sprays of the flowers, and watched, always watched, for the soldier who had gone to war. She had waited and waited for word, after her handsome beau had marched off so proud.
And the news had come, and she had been devastated her whole life through. But in her widowhood status, although in truth they had been barely married a month, her position in the hierarchy of that remote settlement was assured. And so it was that she could bustle about every day, happy, enormously happy, at the way things looked, the way the flowers were coming on, the way her chooks were by far the best, the way the choko vine crawled splendidly over the water tank, and ensured there would always be something to eat.
She would have been astonished at the luxuries of the present day; astonished or perhaps even appalled. All the easy wealth and take-away food, the garbage diets and constant acquisitions, the televisions running in the corners of their lives, none of it would have made her any prouder than she already was; supremely happy as she saddled up the horse and dray, ready for the trip out to a neighbouring property, her basket full of presents from the garden. Her heart could have burst with pride, she was so happy.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/global-warming/lng-will-get-aid-in-emissions-tradeoff/2008/07/24/1216492641649.html
KEVIN RUDD has signalled the first compromise in his emissions trading scheme by promising that the lucrative liquefied natural gas industry would be assisted to shield it from damage.
The Prime Minister gave the assurance yesterday as divided Coalition MPs postured ahead of next Wednesday's party room meeting where the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, will attempt to broker a policy position on climate change between the sceptics and believers in his ranks.
The Coalition divisions have partially masked the Government's own problems with the proposed scheme which include a hostile LNG industry, led by the North West Shelf operator Woodside Petroleum.
At the Port of Darwin yesterday, the possible site of a proposed multibillion-dollar LNG investment, Mr Rudd said the industry would receive either free permits or cash if necessary from the Climate Change Assistance fund.
This catch-all fund is designed to assist polluting industries which do not otherwise qualify for adjustment assistance...
One MP advocating doing nothing said 70 per cent of the party room either did not believe in climate change or was sceptical.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24072300-3102,00.html
A COHORT of Queensland climate change sceptics will be Liberal leader Brendan Nelson's strongest allies next week.
And the Coalition boss will need their help if he wants to back away from a 2012 deadline for emission trading.
Senator Barnaby Joyce is the most forthright of the MPs growing increasingly hostile to an emissions trading scheme and claiming the jury is still out on the science.
National Party leader Warren Truss also appears to be siding with former Liberal Cabinet minister Kevin Andrews - a strong sceptic who is urging Dr Nelson to wait until other major polluters show their hand before settling on an ETS date.
Ron Boswell, Bruce Scott and veteran Liberal MP Ian Macfarlane have all consistently expressed reservations about climate change, while Liberals such as Andrew Laming don't want to comment on the issue until after next week's meeting.
But as federal Opposition frontbencher Joe Hockey was yesterday insisting, the Coalition wouldn't be forced into declaring an ETS date, Senator Joyce was calling for rationality to return to an issue with fundamentalist religious overtones.
"And Garnaut has suddenly appeared as some sort of high priest," he said of the author of a draft report on an ETS scheme, Ross Garnaut. "Those who question are immediately attacked. It's all starting to appear a little Spanish Inquisitionish."
Senator Joyce said Labor had appeared to fall for a self-indulgent conceit in committing to a 2010 deadline.
"And that is that the rest of the world cares what Australia is doing on the issue," he said.
"Let's be honest here, the rest of the world doesn't give a toss what we're doing. They're not walking around Washington discussing an Australian ETS."
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5495/
‘This is my fourth book. I’ve never had any difficulty getting a publisher. In fact, I’ve got the contracts before the books were written. But this one - I couldn’t get a publisher anywhere in this country… it shows the unhelpful and unhealthy climate, in a different sense, there is over this issue.’
Nigel Lawson, former UK chancellor of the exchequer and energy secretary in the 1980s Conservative government, has become a high-profile critic of current orthodoxies on climate change. In a week when the legitimacy of criticising the mainstream view has been called into question following the UK television regulator’s censuring of the Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, a debate featuring Lawson looked likely to be lively. And so it proved...
he one thing that is absolutely clear about the science is that it isn’t certain, far from it’, began Lawson. That is not to say that there isn’t plenty of common ground between sceptics and mainstream views of the science, as Lawson pointed out. ‘Most people would agree there have been huge increases in concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere’; ‘there is no real argument that the major contributor to that has been man, through the burning of carbon’; and ‘there is no doubt there is such a thing as the greenhouse effect or that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas’.
For Lawson, the real uncertainty is around how big the effect of carbon dioxide will be on temperatures. While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that most of the warming over the past 100 years has been due to human activity, Lawson argued that the consensus isn’t as complete as is usually suggested. He pointed to a survey conducted by the German climate scientist, Hans von Storch - someone who has supported the mainstream view of the science while being critical of much of the presentation of it in the media. The survey asked 500 climate scientists, under strict promise of anonymity, for their view on the debate. Of those surveyed, 70 per cent supported the view that global warming was mostly caused by humans; 30 per cent did not. While science should never be ‘conducted by a head count’, said Lawson, it is clear that the much-vaunted unanimity is absent...
But Lawson’s real beef is with the other aspects of the IPCC’s report. Moving on to the effects of climate change, Lawson noted that in many respects, the IPCC’s forecasts are not that scary. ‘Even if you look at the IPCC’s own estimates you find, both in the particular and the general, it really is much less alarming than the flesh-creeping things that are written in the Independent newspaper or by the people who run the IPCC, as opposed to the scientists and economists who produce the reports.’
Lawson pointed out that ‘there are many benefits as well as harms from global warming. So, what is the net effect?’ On health, the only thing that the IPCC is ‘virtually certain’ of, said Lawson, is that there will be fewer deaths from cold-related diseases if the planet gets warmer; a rise in temperatures of up to 2.8 degrees would, says the IPCC, be beneficial for food production. These net benefits are declared despite what Lawson called the IPCC’s ‘very curious treatment of adaptation’ - in other words, the assumption that people would behave pretty much as they do now as temperatures rise, rather than changing the way they live and the crops they grow to suit climatic conditions.
The bottom line for Lawson, drawing out the IPCC’s own conclusions, is that even at the worst end of the projections the IPCC posits as reasonably likely, those who might suffer the most - people in the developing world - would be 8.5 times better off than they are now rather than 9.5 times better off if warming were more limited. There were, concluded Lawson with understatement, worse catastrophes imaginable.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5490/
The blasphemy laws are dead and buried in Britain. Courtesy of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which passed into law on 8 July 2008, it is no longer a common law offence to speak or publish any contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous words relating to God, Jesus Christ or the Bible. Thank Christ (or whoever) for that.
Yet just as religious blasphemy collapses under the weight of satirical operas featuring Jesus Christ in a nappy and shelf-hogging books about why God is dead, or a bastard, or both, so a new form of scientific blasphemy is emerging to take its place.
You can say what you like about Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but say anything reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous about a climate change scientist and you will be punished. You won’t receive a literal lashing, but you will get a metaphorical one. Speak ill of a climate expert and you’re likely to be stuck in the stocks of the public media and branded as a fact-denying, truth-distorting threat to public morals.
Increasingly in the climate change debate, no dissent can be brooked. I mean none. That is why, from the thousands and thousands of hours of TV programming devoted to climate change issues last year – from news reports on the threat of global warming to the lifestyle makeover shows imploring us to Go Green – only one has been singled out for censure. The one that questioned whether climate change is occurring. The Great Global Warming Swindle by maverick filmmaker Martin Durkin.
Today, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) has published a lengthy document censuring Channel 4 for showing Durkin’s film on 8 March 2007. Yet what is striking about Ofcom’s ruling is that it slaps Channel 4’s wrists, not for any inaccuracies in Durkin’s film (of which, it is claimed, there are many), but for its ‘unfair treatment’ of climate change experts.
Ofcom rejected complaints that Durkin’s film was factually inaccurate on the basis that it did not ‘materially mislead the audience so as to cause harm or offence’ (1). Yet it upheld or partly upheld complaints by Sir David King (Britain’s former chief scientific adviser), Professor Carl Wunsch (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all of whom say they were treated unfairly by the film.
Yet, as far as I can tell, King, Wunsch and the IPCC – an extremely powerful body which, come on, is surely robust enough to deal with one TV documentary having a pop at it – were simply submitted to the rough-and-tumble of testy journalistic debate.
Free advice is worth the price.
Robert Half
No one can be right all of the time, but it helps to be right most of the time.
Robert Half
What happens when the future has come and gone?
Robert Half
All is not lost. We don't come skittering down through the high valleys seeking escape, we don't find old capped out village houses in which to hide. Those secret alcoves and hideaway spots we have always sought are not well, are not welcome, have diversified out of his life and taken on other forms. Crackling beasts forming out of air, serious soldiers entering the debate for the first time, the clash of swords in medieval fighting, all of it offered a pathway to a new life; to return to his own village, his wife, his children, his family, his grandmother crouched on the house steps, watching the children play.
He had once been one of those children; until the inexorable forces of growth and nature took him away from the place he had loved so much, the place where he thought he would always be. Growing up, he could never imagined there was anywhere else. This beautiful place, these people, he thought that was the entire universe. They had run and played in the spring meadows, without a care. How resonant that phrase now seemed: "without a care".
The fighting had be4en harsh, and he felt guilty at the blood on his hands, even though it had been a noble fight - he had protected his village, his clan's honour. The warrior caste, they called him, part of the warrior caste that protected their village, their honour, their people, their culture, their traditions. The smoke pouring from old fires. The beautifully made houses, made to withstand the harshest of winters. All these race memories filtered through into an entirely different era, an era of soft options and motor cars, crowded cities and common compromises.
Because there had been so little to believe in, and that which he had believed had turned out to be entirely wrong, he found himself longing for a simpler time, when rights and wrongs were mapped out like black and white on a chequer board, and there was no doubt. A world where machines did not dominate everything they did. Where there was nobility in action and labour, not just in those days preparing for battle and there determined, and successful, attempts to defend the village. But the days when he was assigned to work in the fields, to dig trenches and bring in the harvest.
How beautiful the women had been, way back then, how uncomplicated his lust. Now the women were drunk with power and obsessed with petty injustices allegedly perpetrated against them, when in fact the warrior caste had protected them for centuries. Everything had been turned upside down, in this strange modern place. It was impossible to imagine what could have been. He didn't know where these strange entities came from, moving in and out of his consciousness, forming their own identity. He couldn't work out what they were, past entities, strange spirits?
But whoever they were, it was a crowded place, different entities inhabiting him every day. The old maid from Tambar was fading now, bustling off to look after her house, mind the chooks, gloat over having the best house in the village. Gloat in the sunlight as it hit the splendid purple sprays of the flowers, and watched, always watched, for the soldier who had gone to war. She had waited and waited for word, after her handsome beau had marched off so proud.
And the news had come, and she had been devastated her whole life through. But in her widowhood status, although in truth they had been barely married a month, her position in the hierarchy of that remote settlement was assured. And so it was that she could bustle about every day, happy, enormously happy, at the way things looked, the way the flowers were coming on, the way her chooks were by far the best, the way the choko vine crawled splendidly over the water tank, and ensured there would always be something to eat.
She would have been astonished at the luxuries of the present day; astonished or perhaps even appalled. All the easy wealth and take-away food, the garbage diets and constant acquisitions, the televisions running in the corners of their lives, none of it would have made her any prouder than she already was; supremely happy as she saddled up the horse and dray, ready for the trip out to a neighbouring property, her basket full of presents from the garden. Her heart could have burst with pride, she was so happy.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/global-warming/lng-will-get-aid-in-emissions-tradeoff/2008/07/24/1216492641649.html
KEVIN RUDD has signalled the first compromise in his emissions trading scheme by promising that the lucrative liquefied natural gas industry would be assisted to shield it from damage.
The Prime Minister gave the assurance yesterday as divided Coalition MPs postured ahead of next Wednesday's party room meeting where the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, will attempt to broker a policy position on climate change between the sceptics and believers in his ranks.
The Coalition divisions have partially masked the Government's own problems with the proposed scheme which include a hostile LNG industry, led by the North West Shelf operator Woodside Petroleum.
At the Port of Darwin yesterday, the possible site of a proposed multibillion-dollar LNG investment, Mr Rudd said the industry would receive either free permits or cash if necessary from the Climate Change Assistance fund.
This catch-all fund is designed to assist polluting industries which do not otherwise qualify for adjustment assistance...
One MP advocating doing nothing said 70 per cent of the party room either did not believe in climate change or was sceptical.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24072300-3102,00.html
A COHORT of Queensland climate change sceptics will be Liberal leader Brendan Nelson's strongest allies next week.
And the Coalition boss will need their help if he wants to back away from a 2012 deadline for emission trading.
Senator Barnaby Joyce is the most forthright of the MPs growing increasingly hostile to an emissions trading scheme and claiming the jury is still out on the science.
National Party leader Warren Truss also appears to be siding with former Liberal Cabinet minister Kevin Andrews - a strong sceptic who is urging Dr Nelson to wait until other major polluters show their hand before settling on an ETS date.
Ron Boswell, Bruce Scott and veteran Liberal MP Ian Macfarlane have all consistently expressed reservations about climate change, while Liberals such as Andrew Laming don't want to comment on the issue until after next week's meeting.
But as federal Opposition frontbencher Joe Hockey was yesterday insisting, the Coalition wouldn't be forced into declaring an ETS date, Senator Joyce was calling for rationality to return to an issue with fundamentalist religious overtones.
"And Garnaut has suddenly appeared as some sort of high priest," he said of the author of a draft report on an ETS scheme, Ross Garnaut. "Those who question are immediately attacked. It's all starting to appear a little Spanish Inquisitionish."
Senator Joyce said Labor had appeared to fall for a self-indulgent conceit in committing to a 2010 deadline.
"And that is that the rest of the world cares what Australia is doing on the issue," he said.
"Let's be honest here, the rest of the world doesn't give a toss what we're doing. They're not walking around Washington discussing an Australian ETS."
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5495/
‘This is my fourth book. I’ve never had any difficulty getting a publisher. In fact, I’ve got the contracts before the books were written. But this one - I couldn’t get a publisher anywhere in this country… it shows the unhelpful and unhealthy climate, in a different sense, there is over this issue.’
Nigel Lawson, former UK chancellor of the exchequer and energy secretary in the 1980s Conservative government, has become a high-profile critic of current orthodoxies on climate change. In a week when the legitimacy of criticising the mainstream view has been called into question following the UK television regulator’s censuring of the Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, a debate featuring Lawson looked likely to be lively. And so it proved...
he one thing that is absolutely clear about the science is that it isn’t certain, far from it’, began Lawson. That is not to say that there isn’t plenty of common ground between sceptics and mainstream views of the science, as Lawson pointed out. ‘Most people would agree there have been huge increases in concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere’; ‘there is no real argument that the major contributor to that has been man, through the burning of carbon’; and ‘there is no doubt there is such a thing as the greenhouse effect or that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas’.
For Lawson, the real uncertainty is around how big the effect of carbon dioxide will be on temperatures. While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that most of the warming over the past 100 years has been due to human activity, Lawson argued that the consensus isn’t as complete as is usually suggested. He pointed to a survey conducted by the German climate scientist, Hans von Storch - someone who has supported the mainstream view of the science while being critical of much of the presentation of it in the media. The survey asked 500 climate scientists, under strict promise of anonymity, for their view on the debate. Of those surveyed, 70 per cent supported the view that global warming was mostly caused by humans; 30 per cent did not. While science should never be ‘conducted by a head count’, said Lawson, it is clear that the much-vaunted unanimity is absent...
But Lawson’s real beef is with the other aspects of the IPCC’s report. Moving on to the effects of climate change, Lawson noted that in many respects, the IPCC’s forecasts are not that scary. ‘Even if you look at the IPCC’s own estimates you find, both in the particular and the general, it really is much less alarming than the flesh-creeping things that are written in the Independent newspaper or by the people who run the IPCC, as opposed to the scientists and economists who produce the reports.’
Lawson pointed out that ‘there are many benefits as well as harms from global warming. So, what is the net effect?’ On health, the only thing that the IPCC is ‘virtually certain’ of, said Lawson, is that there will be fewer deaths from cold-related diseases if the planet gets warmer; a rise in temperatures of up to 2.8 degrees would, says the IPCC, be beneficial for food production. These net benefits are declared despite what Lawson called the IPCC’s ‘very curious treatment of adaptation’ - in other words, the assumption that people would behave pretty much as they do now as temperatures rise, rather than changing the way they live and the crops they grow to suit climatic conditions.
The bottom line for Lawson, drawing out the IPCC’s own conclusions, is that even at the worst end of the projections the IPCC posits as reasonably likely, those who might suffer the most - people in the developing world - would be 8.5 times better off than they are now rather than 9.5 times better off if warming were more limited. There were, concluded Lawson with understatement, worse catastrophes imaginable.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5490/
The blasphemy laws are dead and buried in Britain. Courtesy of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which passed into law on 8 July 2008, it is no longer a common law offence to speak or publish any contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous words relating to God, Jesus Christ or the Bible. Thank Christ (or whoever) for that.
Yet just as religious blasphemy collapses under the weight of satirical operas featuring Jesus Christ in a nappy and shelf-hogging books about why God is dead, or a bastard, or both, so a new form of scientific blasphemy is emerging to take its place.
You can say what you like about Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but say anything reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous about a climate change scientist and you will be punished. You won’t receive a literal lashing, but you will get a metaphorical one. Speak ill of a climate expert and you’re likely to be stuck in the stocks of the public media and branded as a fact-denying, truth-distorting threat to public morals.
Increasingly in the climate change debate, no dissent can be brooked. I mean none. That is why, from the thousands and thousands of hours of TV programming devoted to climate change issues last year – from news reports on the threat of global warming to the lifestyle makeover shows imploring us to Go Green – only one has been singled out for censure. The one that questioned whether climate change is occurring. The Great Global Warming Swindle by maverick filmmaker Martin Durkin.
Today, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) has published a lengthy document censuring Channel 4 for showing Durkin’s film on 8 March 2007. Yet what is striking about Ofcom’s ruling is that it slaps Channel 4’s wrists, not for any inaccuracies in Durkin’s film (of which, it is claimed, there are many), but for its ‘unfair treatment’ of climate change experts.
Ofcom rejected complaints that Durkin’s film was factually inaccurate on the basis that it did not ‘materially mislead the audience so as to cause harm or offence’ (1). Yet it upheld or partly upheld complaints by Sir David King (Britain’s former chief scientific adviser), Professor Carl Wunsch (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all of whom say they were treated unfairly by the film.
Yet, as far as I can tell, King, Wunsch and the IPCC – an extremely powerful body which, come on, is surely robust enough to deal with one TV documentary having a pop at it – were simply submitted to the rough-and-tumble of testy journalistic debate.
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