Here Comes the Sum:
Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster

3,013 words

Christopher Booker
The Real Global Warming Disaster
New York/London: Continuum, 2009

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was never in any meaningful sense a scientific body, nor was it intended to be. It was essentially a political organization, using the prestige of science to promote the purposes of those who ran it. — Christopher Booker, The Real Global Warming Disaster

Tell me why, tell me why, why do you have to lie? — The Sex Pistols, “Liar”

Global warming. It’s one of those subjects, isn’t it? As both Kant and Montaigne wrote, what can we know? Even when the brand was relaunched as “climate change,” it didn’t add to the store of knowledge of the average Joe or Joanne so much as divert attention from the fact they were just having their pockets picked in the name of the elites’ new toy. Do you know to a reasonable certainty what is happening to the planet, ecologically speaking, and whether or not it is natural or cyclical or caused by mankind? No. Neither do I. Perhaps if we had millions of dollars and a trained team of a dozen or so politically neutral climatologists — good luck with finding them — and experienced researchers, and maybe throw in a media analyst who was not beholden to the mainstream media, in ten years or so we might have a thumbnail sketch.

In the end, when it comes to taking sides in this ideological long war, you tend to go with your gut feeling, hunches, and the idea that if Tony Blair, David Miliband, Al Gore, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all tell you something is true, make sure you don’t pass up the opportunity to buy that bridge they are selling.

I will start with a full disclosure. I have read more books about punk rock than I have about climate change. Here is what I have read, in order:

The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg

Watermelons by James Delingpole

A Disgrace to the Profession by Mark Steyn et al.

And that’s it, apart from the book featured here, the late Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster. So please don’t be coming to me for expertise. Of course I’ve read many features and pieces on climate and the environment over the years, but in the end it’s still a riddle. I don’t know, and neither do you. In the end, you believe in one side or the other. As both George Michael and Søren Kierkegaard so rightly pointed out, you’ve got to have faith.

Booker’s thesis is simple, clearly explained, and ultimately prescient. The Real Global Warming Disaster (RGWD) is a 2009 book by this excellent — and now sadly deceased — English journalist, in which he unpacks why the real global warming disaster will not be parched riverbeds or polar bears balancing on shrinking ice-floes, but the con-trick paid on the working (essentially meaning white Western) public in the form of green taxes and other hustles, which we are now seeing and which is compounding the already inevitable inflation after years of quantitative easing — aka printing money.

This book is essentially a genealogy of what we and our bank balances are now living through, collaring the main culprits in the grand scam that is the global warming, or climate change, industry. Like so much in the modern world, it’s a hustle. The most frightening thing about the book is not rising sea levels in the tiny island of Tuvalu, but how willing the elites are to make money out of fear. Muggers and con-artists do that. There is a connection.

Booker gives a family tree of the whole climate change highway robbery which started many years ago, and due to which we are now being told to stand and deliver. The seeds of what we are now living through were two books, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 warning to humanity, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich’s book, Booker writes, was the first to kick-start Western self-hatred in the area of the environment (before the elites discovered the power of race), with the author “painting mankind as the ultimate villain in the story of Planet Earth, predicting doom in every direction.”

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.

Now, once the media pick up on fear and guilt, they will run with that, and of course the media play a big part in Booker’s account of the history of a scam. The media work on their public using the exacerbation of fear. Let me try and illustrate. Fear is a particular type of enjoyment not immediately apparent as such, and the media know this. Excuse my age, but let’s take three enjoyable old American movies (at least in my view) to point us in the right direction. Casablanca makes you feel all brave and lump-in-the-throat, Caddyshack should be made into a pharmaceutical product and marketed to unhappy people because it is so funny, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion is a genuinely frightening movie. They are all enjoyable, but you don’t need to be a clinical psychologist to see that the “enjoyment” is somewhat different in each case. The media understand this categorization. To quote a book (and movie) title by Alistair McClean, for the media, fear is the key.

As is so often the case, it is the United Nations who are the malevolent éminences grises here, setting up as they did the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a bunch of super-hustlers whose “brief was not to weigh the evidence for whether or not man-made warming was taking place. It was to take ‘human-induced climate change’ as a given.” Booker makes clear that while the science has never been settled, the fix was most definitely in a long while ago.

Suffice to say that all the usual suspects — the chisellers, the grifters, the hustlers — are present and correct. Sharks are supposed to be able to detect the tiniest amount of blood in the water. Politicians share that olfactory talent with money. But rather than suitcases full of bricks of dollars from the mob or the unions, like back in the day or the movies, politicians now have a different way of getting juiced in. I choose at random from the boondoggle kings mentioned in RGWD, and because I am English I nominate Ed Miliband, easily the worst Labour leader in my lifetime, and that up against a strong field. His brother David also smelt cash, and is an even worse little shit than his brother.

In 2008, when climate change fever was taking hold and the political class realized that this was a route to the loot, Miliband extended the governmental reading of something called “The Climate Change Bill” by adding an amendment (while American amendments mean something, by comparison British amendments are low-value poker chips in the political game) which would commit Britain to reducing its carbon omissions by 80% over 40 years. Then the grants started, and no one really followed the money. That isn’t really allowed in this great game.

Boethius is very clear on this in his notes on Aristotle. The past and the present are fair game for the philosopher; the future not so much. I don’t know the Latin from memory, but essentially, promises don’t mean shit. And when global warming and its attendant money-printing industry is not attempting to choke guilt from the populace, they sure are making promises. Promises and threats.

The response of the political class to the ginned-up crisis of global warming was more technocracy, and not the cheap stuff. These people don’t want to drink cava or Prosecco at their Davos jamborees. They want the Bollinger. They are really very good at this, taking your money. I often sneer at technocracy and the managerial ethos prevalent throughout societies in the West. But it is a bit like poking out your tongue at the guy who just beat you up. At the moment – and there may be a count going on, as in boxing – the technocrats are winning, and Booker takes us through the history of the environmental lobby, a technocratic master-class, and its obvious anti-white Western driving ideology.

This is exemplified by the pass China and India have had since the first IPCC jamborees. The Chinese and the Indians actually make a perfectly valid point, however. Why did the West get to spew out the supposedly ruinous emissions they say they did, and that they are now lecturing us about, and now we have to buy carbon credits from Al Gore’s friends? Doesn’t work that way. You can’t just ban the game of pool because it is our turn on the pool table.

And, of course, they were aided and abetted by the lobbyists who scented money. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Environmental Defense Fund knew a boondoggle when they smelt one, still do. In 1989, Booker writes, “there was suddenly a great deal of money available for money available for research into climate change.”

Research into climate change turned out to be like a big ugly doorman at a nasty nightclub: If your name’s not down, you ain’t coming in. Booker makes clear that “scientific consensus” means those who sing for their supper. Science has always been funded, but in the time of Newton (for example) scientists were either independently wealthy or the people doing the funding were doing so for the sheer thrill of intellectual discovery. Booker makes it clear that this is no longer the case. Environmental science is a gypsy fair in which you buy what you can afford to buy, and you stay within the rules or out the door you go, and the mainstream media have never really touched this, Booker aside. And, of course, wherever you find malevolence in the modern world, there too you will find the media. The BBC sent 400 staff members to cover Obama’s inauguration, and when the Chosen One tested the water with a couple of shout-outs to global warming and its supporters, they ran with it.

Since then, the IPCC and their satellite hustlers have broken every rule of scientific integrity. I don’t know much about scientific publishing because I am not a scientist, but I do know that if a peer-reviewed paper signed off by a number of respected scientists has its text substantially changed between peer review and publication, this is utterly dishonest, and the point at which science becomes politics. Booker covers this at length.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Bestest Boys here.

As we are seeing now with transgenderism, the first casualty of cultural war is reality. The climate lobby, like the Left in general, have absolutely no problem with dispensing with the truth as long as they win. Plato has Socrates say in the Theaetetus that he hopes the conversation is being conducted to arrive at the truth and not simply for the sake of winning. This idea is absolute anathema to the warmists, one of whom exclaimed, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.” This is exemplary of the Left now. It’s true, but it doesn’t fit our narrative? Get it out of here! These efforts to rewrite history are now a familiar trope for those of us who have watched the malevolent Left for the last 20 years. We are seeing it in overdrive now with racial history. The Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and the twentieth-century Little Cooling are all inconvenient truths, to borrow from the title of Al Gore’s (in)famous documentary. That film, Booker relates, was sent to every one of Britain’s 3,385 state schools shortly after its release. Just as transgenderism is being foisted onto young, malleable minds now, the people teaching them were already used to this type of classroom indoctrination.

And the new world governance that we are now seeing being flown into place like a bad set of stage scenery found global warming to be an excellent component. When 175 delegates from most of the world’s countries descended on Bonn for one of their beanos, Booker writes:

Before they arrived in Bonn, a 16-page document was circulated . . . setting out its own agenda. According to one account, based on a copy leaked in advance, it envisioned “a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes.”

Sound familiar? This truly is a grand deceit made up of a lot of smaller untruths.

There are so many feints Booker exposes, as well as lies and corrupt practice. One of the game-plays the climate change lobby uses is something called “proxy data,” which just looks to me like false extrapolation, whereby you use an illegitimately small sample of x to prove laws about x in general. So it is with the infamous “hockey stick” graph apparently showing a sharp rise in global temperature since the arrival of post-Industrial Revolution mankind:

McIntyre and McKitrick had, for instance, shown that, if the controversial bristlecone pines were removed from Mann’s proxy data, leaving only the other proxies, the “hockey stick shape disappeared.”

McIntyre and McKitrick stayed, like Laurel and Hardy, on the trail of the lonesome pine, and they threw doubt on the whole “hockey stick” icon. (I was confused years ago when I first read about the hockey stick curve, because when Brits say “hockey” they mean field hockey, but all became clear.)

One of the chief villains of the piece is not even human, and it is the computer model. Phenomenally expensive computers produced much of the propaganda that has fueled the whole climate change jalopy. Modelling as a concept seems to hypnotize statisticians and their ilk. I remember a conversation I had with an economist some 20 years ago at a party. I am always eager to speak with people who are experts — or at least students, as in this case — in something of which I know nothing. I asked the young lady a question to which I genuinely wanted an answer. How, I asked, do you compare the economies of very different cultures? Mathematics is the common denominator, obviously, but is the calibration of an economy affected by cultural difference? How can you compare the economies of Denmark and Afghanistan? She replied, it all depends on the models. It was her answer to all the other questions I asked her about economics. She was Southeast Asian, Korean or similar, and pronounced the word “models” as “modaws.” All depends on modaws. I always think of that word when I read about modelling in any kind of stats-based enterprise, like global warming. It’s the modaws.

There is a strange comment by a critic of global warming, a gentleman called Lindzen, in Booker’s book. Models, he says in a summing up of IPCC findings, “are known to agree more with each other than with nature (even after ‘tuning’)”. It is models — or “modaws” — that delineate policy, something I find sinister and ruinous. It is models — as well as shoddy experimental practice — which led to the infamous and, as we have seen, spurious “hockey stick” which commanded so much of climate theory.

Naturally, climate rhetoric is charged with emotive allusions, and rhetorical associations play a large part in the language used for media purposes. And, just as inevitably, the rhetoric leads us to the gates of Auschwitz, as it always will. The phrase “climate denier” is obviously tooled to be correspondent with “holocaust denier,” which, as we know, is even worse than racism. Here is Al Gore in 1992: “Today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.”

Gore is, of course, the ringleader of this oily gang of thieves. Reading the book, though, you find all of recent history’s bad guys and gals present and accounted for: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Kyoto, the IPCC, Maurice Strong, Michael Mann, Britain’s Royal Society, and every Western leader ever since. Funnily enough, the only dissidents who come out of this well are Bush Junior, Nigel Lawson (Britain’s ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer), and Vladimir Putin. And even the Russian currently attempting to carve up Europe turned coat when he smelt the money.

Personally, my belief is that mankind is what the media and politicians are fond of calling “an existential threat” to the planet. But it isn’t pollution, your diesel truck, or failing to use the correct recycling container on a Wednesday that threatens old Gaia. No, it is religious psychotics with nuclear weapons.

This is rather unscientific, and is based on a conversation I had a decade ago with a nuclear physicist and which concerned nuclear weapons. I told him I remembered reading that, in the 1960s, if all the nuclear materiel on the planet had detonated simultaneously, it would have irradiated much of the planet and exterminate a lot of life forms, but it would not have affected the spherical integrity of the globe which planet Earth is. Quite possibly accurate, he said, but it’s not true now. Throw a burning Zippo into the nuclear firework shed today and chunks will be blown off the globe, and then you are playing pool with a chipped cue ball, and good luck with that frame because it will be the last of the evening. The Earth’s orbit would decay, and it would eventually spiral into the Sun. As I say, hardly peer-reviewed, but it stayed with me, and I often think about that conversation as we watch the assistance America has given and is giving in developing Iran’s nuclear capability.

The Real Global Warming Scandal is well worth your time, and is both a timeline of one of the biggest ideological heists in history and an accurate prediction of the who the real victims of the cult of climate change would end up being: you, or, rather, your income, savings, and tax rate. So, you. And your family.

In Martin Scorsese’s movie Casino, Robert de Niro’s character, Sam “Ace” Rothstein, sums up the global warming scam to a nicety while describing exactly what the point of a casino is:

“In the end, it’s all done to get your money.”

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