{"id":5221,"date":"2011-01-08T00:50:51","date_gmt":"2011-01-08T00:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5221"},"modified":"2011-01-08T00:50:51","modified_gmt":"2011-01-08T00:50:51","slug":"if-only-it-were-about-the-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/if-only-it-were-about-the-science\/","title":{"rendered":"If Only It Were About The Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Cross-posted over at the Corner<\/a>
\nBritain\u2018s winter snows generate an interesting reaction<\/a> from Spiked\u2018s Brendan O\u2019Neill. Here\u2019s an extract:<\/p>\n

\u2026I\u2019m not one of those people who believes snowfall necessarily disproves every claim made by warming-obsessed climatologists. Rather the snow crisis demonstrated, in high definition, the gap between the fear-fuelled thinking of the elite and the struggles of everyday people. It illuminated the million metaphorical miles that now separate the fantasy politics of our so-called betters from the concerns of the rest of us.
\nNot surprisingly, with snowstorms smothering Western Europe and the East Coast of America, many asked: \u2018What happened to global warming?\u2019 On the 20-hour bus-and-boat-and-train-and-car journey I took from London to Galway, surrounded by people forced to make a similar trek because their flights were also cancelled, there was much jocular banter along the lines of: \u2018So this is the climate change we\u2019ve been warned about\u2026\u2019 As people made new friends and arranged impromptu carpools for the final legs of their journeys, there was a palpable sense that the world we inhabit is not the same as that inhabited by greens. That isn\u2019t surprising when you consider that greens have been telling us for the past decade that snow will disappear from our lives. Literally\u2026Newspapers provided us with a \u2018hellish vision of life on a hotter planet\u2019 where deserts would \u2018reach into the heart of Europe\u2019 and global warming would \u2018reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles\u2019.<\/p>\n

Dramatic stuff. And unadulterated nonsense. The thing that occupied people\u2019s minds at the end of 2010 was not how to explain to their sweating children in the deserts of Hampshire why snow disappeared from our lives, but rather how to negotiate actual snow. Again, this isn\u2019t to say that the snow proves there is no planetary warming at all: if it is mad to cite every change in the weather as proof that Earth is doomed, then it\u2019s probably also unwise to dance around in the slushy white stuff in the belief that it proves that all environmental scientists are demented liars. But the world of difference between expert predictions (hot hell) and our real experiences (freezing nightmare) is a powerful symbol of the distance that now exists between the apocalypse-fantasising elites and the public.<\/p>\n

What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn\u2019t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn\u2019t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind\u2019s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies \u2013 and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Spot on, I think. And an old, and all too familiar, story. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted over at the Corner Britain\u2018s winter snows generate an interesting reaction from Spiked\u2018s Brendan O\u2019Neill. Here\u2019s an extract: \u2026I\u2019m not one of those people who believes snowfall necessarily disproves every claim made by warming-obsessed climatologists. Rather the snow crisis … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[511,397],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5221"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5224,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5221\/revisions\/5224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}