Climate Change: Copenhagan cock-up and contrarian conspiracy theory.

Monday, 21 December 2009
Climate Change: Copenhagan cock-up and contrarian conspiracy theory.
Wow. I'm glad that's behind us.


I hate to be the pessimist or the "told you so" guy, but who on earth really thought that mediocrities and climate criminals like Brown, Merkel and Sarkozy or the Chinese Government had the real interests of our planet home at heart? The other one's got bells on.


What we saw was the usual suspect ecocriminal capitalists fly in to lecture us before failing, as usual, to achieve anything meaningful. Meanwhile, protesters were mass arrested in their hundreds for the crime of expressing an opinion and many were carted off to be beaten up in their cells. That contrast tells you all you need to know. The Danish police are clearly not going through the re-appraisals forced on their UK counterparts by the G20 events and the excellent Climate Camp legal team.


At the start of the fortnight of farce Brown said we have a "right to be angry" - something of a mea culpa via Freudian slip because his own record on the environment is distinctly poor as the former Government chief adviser says:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6745082/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Gordon-Browns-climate-change-record-attacked.html


As with so many things, Brown's stated ambitions sound very weak since he and his party have had 12 years get to grips with the climate challenge.


He welcomed protest before, at the G8 Make Poverty History event, sadly another failure. Ed Miliband (or his flunkies to be precise) had been contacting thousands of activists asking them to pressurise on the issue. When the government sponsors protests to get them to do something it has the distinct ring of the dog days of the USSR.


So Copenhagen was a fairly predictable waste of time.


What has been more interesting in recent weeks is the crescendo in the skeptic camp, stemming mainly from the hacking (or leaking) of the Hadley Centre emails. In the first instance am glad that the IPCC has called for an investigation. People diddling stats is old as the hills, but this really doesn't this put nails in the coffin for the basic principles. However, rightly or wrongly, the story has muddied the waters.


The timing of the hacking / leaking was clearly political and I would be interested to know just how many dodgy emails fly around between the skeptics, who are often backed by fossil fuel giants.


This is a Good BBC piece on counter arguments to the skeptics.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8376286.stm


In common with most climate skeptics I am not a scientist, but I make a point of asking every scientist I meet what their opinion is regarding human caused climate change. Every one from every discipline and level has told me they concur with the basic principle.


Those who have the dubious pleasure of my acquaintance know that I can prattle on the topic of conspiracy theories to quite an advanced level. There is some very far-out stuff going on and some nefarious forces at work on this planet, I am certainly no establishment dupe.


But each Conspiracy Theory needs to be judged on a case by case basis, and the truth need neither be the official account or the standard CT analysis.


With Climate Change there are a couple of key confusions made by the skeptics which essentially and incorrectly treat certain possibilities as mutually exclusive when they are not:


First there is an assumption towards 2 extremes on the spectrum of possibilities between climate change as human caused and non human caused.


It strikes me as very silly to assume either extreme, and too much of the "debate" does so. Sun activity and other galactic goings-on clearly can affect things here. But the basic principle that certain gasses which we emit will trap heat is sound. CO2 is not the only gas that could do so, Methane is at least as big a concern. 6 billion humans and the animals we raise for food clearly have a huge input into the environment. Look at the traffic in any town or city, worldwide we are constantly pumping stuff up there. Crudely, if you sit and continually fart in a room that room is going to smell after a while. Climate change certainly has happened in the past without as much human intervention, that doesn't mean that human intervention won't change the climate.


However, the case by some skeptics that climate change has become essentially fetishised to the detriment of other eco damage has something to it: Deforestation, dead zones in the sea from over fishing, finite resources, the threat from genetic tampering with food, cloning, fiddling around with viruses in labs, fluoride in the water, HAARP and a host of other issues have dropped too far down the agenda. And yes it is governments and the establishment that are often responsible for this. Which brings me to the second mis-assumption:


The standard skeptic slogan is "Human Caused Climate Change is a scam to tax and control us"


Half truths can be just as dangerous as outright falsehoods.


It is very clear indeed to me that HCCC is a genuine problem that governments and elites would love to use to tax and control us, but this is a nuanced position that won't find much coverage in a media that constantly dumbs down debate.


A consequence is that eco criminals can pretend to be our saviours while lying, preaching and ripping us off. But who gets the blame? Environmentalists. That's certainly a conspiracy theory to juggle with.


An interesting aside: If this was purely a blag for an elite global push for global carbon taxes and increased authoritarianism, how come a whole fortnight of pow-wow didn't achieve anything approaching it? There are clearly structural and political breaks on any New World Order plot.


But Carbon trading and (to a lesser extent) taxes would, in my opinion, be disastrous under the current capitalist system. Taxes would need to be ring-fencedd for genuine environmental projects and building adaption and structural resilience to future climate problems. Pretty unlikely really.


Carbon trading could be a real nightmare - sacrificing the future of the planet at the altar of failed fundamentalist economics. The right to pollute would be traded in a crony capitalist system and within a short space of time there would be huge speculation and derivatives based on it. Whatever the solutions are, one of the last things we should do at the moment is hand huge powers and more control over resources and finance to corporate capitalists and their state government puppets. Sad but true.


This interesting post from by someone on The Independents site, details this kind of concern:


"The most important thing to know about Copenhagen is that every journalist and every politician will be representing big business. No one will be representing us.
The biggest lobbying group at Copenhagen will be the International Emissions Trading Association which was created to promote carbon trading more than ten years ago.


Its members include: BP, Conoco Philips, Shell, E.ON AG (coal power stations owner, EDF (one of the largest participants in the global coal market), Gazprom (Russian oil and gas), Goldman Sachs, Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley."


It's no secret that Al Gore stands to make another fortune out of such systems and this doesn't help climate activists (he also spent loads of that movie in airports for pity's sake). Any attempt to basically set up some kind of parallel carbon currency would be mediated by the banks. Goldman Sachs are big players in the push for this.


Individual's energy use being monitored by government is a ghastly prospect from a civil liberties perspective, certainly the governments we have at the moment.


The skeptics are also right to be alarmed at the prospect of population control being talked up, but that again needn't imply that the excuse itself is fraud.


The Malthusian agenda is out there, the Club of Rome documents alone clearly state the desire to use climate change as a means of increasing control and spinning the meme that humanity is the enemy of the planet. But how humanity behave and humanity per se are very different things.


When the population agenda isn't downright dangerous it is a red herring. It is not nearly so much a question of how many of us there are, but how we behave and specifically how much we consume and pollute. Producerist capitalism, alienation, commodity fetishism and corporate mind programming ensure we collectively consume far more than is either necessary or sustainable. This needn't be a matter of climate change, more so it is a simple matter of finite resources, though it is certainly true, as many skeptics advance, that not enough is being done to provide free energy (or at least very low impact energy) and that this could be deliberate.


The biggest single problem may well not be CO2 but grossly inefficient use of land and water and methane emissions caused by the un-neccessary and cruel meat and dairy habits of the species, especially the richer populations.


So, where do we go from here? We couldn't and shouldn't have trusted our rulers 2 weeks ago and we shouldn't now. Change can only come from our own behaviour, not just in how we consume but in our social relations and political awareness and activities.


Truth is often nuanced, and you aint likely to get it from phoney governments, clueless media and myopic skeptics who too often believe a conspiracy theory purely because it is a CT, rather than on its own merits.


Climate activists work on a huge range of issues beyond just Climate Change, they are defending our planet home from the very same global forces the CTers complain about (though there will be disagreement about the precise nature of those forces). Most climate activists are singularly undupe like, just as scientists generally are inherently skeptical in the first instance, but not generally so in the acceptance of the broad case for HCCC.


The Skeptic case is too often so simplistic, dubious and misdirected that they could consider careers in establishment politics. A few have managed to marry the 2 trajectories already.


I will probably augment this long post in comming days and welcome all comments.


Posted by Steve Durrant