Delighted to see that Professor Philip Stott has re-started his excellent blog which casts a robustly sceptical and authoritative eye over our environmental madness. He has posted a characteristically insightful comment about that ignoble prize for al Gore:

But, more importantly, the politics of this process illustrate perfectly J.-F. Lyotard’s telling prediction in The Postmodern Condition that science will become increasingly legitimised by the ‘social bond’, that is, by what society wishes to be true. Do you think anyone would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for showing that ‘global warming’ is not a threat? In Europe especially, ‘global warming’ is the chosen trope of the political classes. It is a powerful Barthesian myth, and its aim is to exclude all other constructions of knowledge from debate. Al Gore’s ‘elevation’ is simply part of this process of exclusion, namely the trampling down of any dissent by an increasingly assertive, self-referential, grand narrative in the style of Marxism. This must not be allowed to happen.

Alas, it already has. Many scientists have been successfully bullied into silence by the ferocious McCarthyite/Stalinist smear campaigns and inevitable loss of reputation, grant funding or promotion prospects that follows any voicing of the truth about the great climate change scam. But the facts are there for those with eyes to see. Take the great ice calamity. We are told endlessly that man-made global warming is definitively proved by the unprecedented melt under way in the Arctic. But at the same time, as I wrote here the ice in the Antarctic has increased to a level not seen since 1979. So the warmers must therefore believe one of two propositions: either a) that global climate change only affects half the planet but not the other half; or b) that since the melting of Arctic ice proves the planet is about to fry up, the expansion of Antarctic ice must prove that the planet is about to freeze up. Simultaneously.

The scientists observed less perennial ice cover in March 2007 than ever before, with the thick ice confined to the Arctic Ocean north of Canada. Consequently, the Arctic Ocean was dominated by thinner seasonal ice that melts faster. This ice is more easily compressed and responds more quickly to being pushed out of the Arctic by winds. Those thinner seasonal ice conditions facilitated the ice loss, leading to this year’s record low amount of total Arctic sea ice.

Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. ‘Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,’ he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

‘The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century,’ Nghiem said. The Arctic Ocean’s shift from perennial to seasonal ice is preconditioning the sea ice cover there for more efficient melting and further ice reductions each summer. The shift to seasonal ice decreases the reflectivity of Earth’s surface and allows more solar energy to be absorbed in the ice-ocean system.

 

 

After today, no-one can take the Nobel Peace Prize seriously ever again. Al Gore??

with propositions that were

And these were the errors — by which the judge meant claims where Gore departed from the scientific consensus:

And anyway, what on earth has climate change to do with peace?

Update: Good stuff here by the guys on Powerline and Jeff Jacoby about the dubious record and methodology of the prize.

This post on Harry’s Place, a compilation of the arguments used by University and College Union members in their debates about the Israel boycott, underlines what was always plain — that their hatred is fundamental and not restricted to Israel’s policies, and that the division they claim between their hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews is non-existent:

Those most affected by this motion are of course Jews and in an attempt to silence charges of racism delegates at the UCU congress came up with a formula – ‘Israel’s 40-year occupation’ means that ‘passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-Semitic’. What happened on the list shows that this statement was at best misconceived and at worst disingenuous.

There were many times when criticism of Israel crossed red lines, when the tone and content of debate became unacceptable. For those sensitive to the ways in which Jew-hatred creeps into language this was a worrying, indeed ominous development. The State of Israel was demonized as a unique evil on the planet, its Jewish inhabitants characterized as brutal, militaristic racists, its supporters condemned as blood-thirsty Zionists who ruthlessly exploited every opportunity to smear the boycott camp with accusations of anti-Semitism. This tells us much about the boycotters’ self-image. Oblivious to the genuine fears of their opponents they presented themselves as bravely withstanding the power of the Zionist lobby, sole occupants of the moral high ground. A few even drew attention to their Jewish roots and tragic family history (relatives murdered during the holocaust) to give their words greater weight; as if one’s own identity can be used as an excuse to say things with impunity. And all the time the majority of the activists’ list sat on their hands in silence…

Moreover, many boycotters do indeed seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. This is clear from what a couple have incautiously stated as well as from the significant silences during the debate. Despite repeated and polite requests to explain the aims of the boycott and the conditions under which it would end, only one person provided a substantial response – and that was cryptic; ‘Supporters of the boycott have many varied imaginings of what the final settlement will look like – if we are mature we will realise that that the nature of the final outcome will surprise us all’.
Promoting analogies between the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews and the policies of various Israeli governments towards the Palestinians, paying lip-service when asked to condemn examples of Jew hatred in the Arab world and beyond, several advocates of boycott succeeded only in showing themselves in their true colours. That is racist, if not by intent then certainly in effect. This, it must be said, was the most disturbing aspect of the debate.

Individuals who pride themselves on membership of a Union that considers itself at the forefront in the fight against racism, sexism and homophobia, are prepared to make one exception when it comes to defending human rights: Israeli Jews.

 

The open letter from 38 Muslim scholars to the Pope and the leaders of other Christian churches on the subject of peace between the faiths has got the British establishment purring with pleasure. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London have fallen on their knees and given thanks. The Times raved:

Rarely, indeed, has the Muslim world spoken out so clearly on the need for global peace or addressed Christianity in such terms of respect and acceptance of common beliefs… it will make it harder for those who thrive on a narrow, militant interpretation of Islam to pose as the true guardians of the faith.

In an age when Islamic extremism, with its call for lethal revolution, appears to be making the running, it is deeply encouraging to hear a large group of Muslim leaders advocating peaceful coexistence with Christians.

I must have been reading a different document altogether. For it is a classic piece of manipulation and, I’m afraid to say, menace. Masquerading as the promotion of peace through emphasising characteristics that these religions apparently share, it instead effectively puts a scimitar to the neck of the Christian church and says: ‘Peace on our terms’.

At least one cleric gets it. In the Times the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the one Anglican who understands the threat from Islamism, noted that the letter required Christians to adopt the Muslim belief in the oneness of God.

‘One partner cannot dictate the terms on which dialogue must be conducted. This document seems to be on the verge of doing that.’

Others, such as Ruth Gledhill and Robert Spencer have drawn attention to its theological slipperiness and the way it leaves out all the bits in the Koran which revile, curse and urge war upon Jews and Christians. But for me, the message was plain from the internal logic of the document’s argument.

First and foremost, it purports to be a plea to Muslims and Christians to make peace with each other. But this implies that both are at war with each other. This is untrue. The Islamic world — or part of it — has waged war on the Christian (and Jewish) western world. The Christian world is merely responding in self-defence. It is the Islamic world which says it wants to conquer the Christian. The Christian world does not say it wants to conquer Islam, merely that Islam should stop trying to conquer it. Yet the Islamic world pretends that the Christian world is engaged in an act of exterminatory aggression against it.

That lie is the motor of the jihad. That lie is fundamental to the absence of peace between the religions. Yet this letter fails totally to acknowledge this seminal fact. It says:

The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

Very true; but for this piety to be any more than a meaningless truism, the Islamic world has to end its aggression. The letter makes no acknowledgement of this. All the emphasis is on the Christian world altering its behaviour. So its inescapable implication is that for peace to occur, the Christian world must abandon its own self-defence. In other words, there can be no peace without the Christian world surrendering to Islam.

Conspicuously, the letter does not rule out all justification for Islam waging war on Christians. Indeed, by saying that Muslims won’t attack Christians unless Christians attack them, it threatens that if it will indeed attack Christians if it thinks it is justified in doing so:

As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them—so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes, (in accordance with the verse of the Holy Qur’an [Al-Mumtahinah, 60:8] quoted above).

But since the global jihad is being conducted expressly on the false justification that the Christian west is indeed attacking the Islamic world, this amounts to a threat of more of the same unless the west desists. Considering whether Christianity is necessarily against Muslims, it does not answer but instead graciously declares:

We therefore invite Christians to consider Muslims not against and thus with them, in accordance with Jesus Christ’s words here.

In other words, the implication is that Christians are unjustifiably aggressive towards Muslims, and this is because they have failed to understand their own Scripture. And so when it says

So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works. Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual goodwill

How very unfortunate that in the very same week a British High Court Judge, Sir Michael Burton — in a case brought against the government by a parent who objected to the Gore film An Inconvenient Truth being taught in school as fact when it was trash — ruled that this film contained no fewer than nine, ahem, inconvenient untruths.

These nine scientific errors were not minor. They were fundamental to the film’s claim that there was a scientific consensus that man-made global warming was a catastrophe that was already upon us. True, the judge said of the film:

It is substantially founded upon scientific research and fact, albeit that the science is used, in the hands of a talented politician and communicator, to make a political statement and to support a political programme

supported by a vast quantity of research published in peer-reviewed journals worldwide and by the great majority of the world’s climate scientists.

However, since the judge made clear that the barrister representing the aggrieved parent had decided for the purposes of this court case not to contest the broad argument for made-made global warming but to focus instead on specific errors in the film, the judge could hardly have said anything different on that specific point. But where evidence was presented to him that Gore had said things that were demonstrably untrue, he agreed:

There are errors and omissions in the film, to which I shall refer, and respects in which the film, while purporting to set out the mainstream view (and to belittle opposing views), does in fact itself depart from that mainstream, in the sense of the ‘consensus’ expressed in the IPCC reports… some of the errors, or departures from the mainstream, by Mr Gore in AIT in the course of his dynamic exposition, do arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis.

1. ‘Error’ 11: Sea level rise of up to 20 feet (7 metres) will be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland in the near future.
• In scene 21 (the film is carved up for teaching purposes into 32 scenes), in one of the most graphic parts of the film Mr Gore says as follows:
“If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen in the San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, the Low Countries: absolutely devastation. The area around Beijing is home to tens of millions of people. Even worse, in the area around Shanghai, there are 40 million people. Worse still, Calcutta, and to the east Bangladesh, the area covered includes 50 million people. Think of the impact of a couple of hundred thousand refugees when they are displaced by an environmental event and then imagine the impact of a 100 million or more. Here is Manhattan. This is the World Trade Center memorial site. After the horrible events of 9/11 we said never again. This is what would happen to Manhattan. They can measure this precisely, just as scientists could predict precisely how much water would breach the levee in New Orleans.”
• This is distinctly alarmist, and part of Mr Gore’s ‘wake-up call’. It is common ground that if indeed Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of 7 metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus.

2. ‘Error’ 12: Low lying inhabited Pacific atolls are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming.
• In scene 20, Mr Gore states “that’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand”. There is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened.

3. ‘Error’ 18: Shutting down of the “Ocean Conveyor”.
• In scene 17 he says, “One of the ones they are most worried about where they have spent a lot of time studying the problem is the North Atlantic, where the Gulf Stream comes up and meets the cold wind coming off the Arctic over Greenland and evaporates the heat out of the Gulf Stream and the stream is carried over to western Europe by the prevailing winds and the earth’s rotation … they call it the Ocean Conveyor … At the end of the last ice age … that pump shut off and the heat transfer stopped and Europe went back into an ice age for another 900 or 1000 years. Of course that’s not going to happen again, because glaciers of North America are not there. Is there any big chunk of ice anywhere near there? Oh yeah [pointing at Greenland]”. According to the IPCC, it is very unlikely that the Ocean Conveyor (known technically as the Meridional Overturning Circulation or thermohaline circulation) will shut down in the future, though it is considered likely that thermohaline circulation may slow down.

4. ‘Error’ 3: Direct coincidence between rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and in temperature, by reference to two graphs.
• In scenes 8 and 9, Mr Gore shows two graphs relating to a period of 650,000 years, one showing rise in CO2 and one showing rise in temperature, and asserts (by ridiculing the opposite view) that they show an exact fit. Although there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts.

5. ‘Error’ 14: The snows of Kilimanjaro.
• Mr Gore asserts in scene 7 that the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro is expressly attributable to global warming. It is noteworthy that this is a point that specifically impressed Mr Milliband (see the press release quoted at paragraph 6 above). However, it is common ground that, the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

6. ‘Error’ 16: Lake Chad etc
• The drying up of Lake Chad is used as a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming. However, it is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution. It is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability.

7. ‘Error’ 8: Hurricane Katrina.
• In scene 12 Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans is ascribed to global warming. It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that.

8. ‘Error’ 15: Death of polar bears.
• In scene 16, by reference to a dramatic graphic of a polar bear desperately swimming through the water looking for ice, Mr Gore says: “A new scientific study shows that for the first time they are finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances up to 60 miles to find the ice. They did not find that before.” The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm. That is not to say that there may not in the future be drowning-related deaths of polar bears if the trend of regression of pack-ice and/or longer open water continues, but it plainly does not support Mr Gore’s description.

9. ‘Error’ 13: Coral reefs.
• In scene 19, Mr Gore says: “Coral reefs all over the world because of global warming and other factors are bleaching and they end up like this. All the fish species that depend on the coral reef are also in jeopardy as a result. Overall specie loss is now occurring at a rate 1000 times greater than the natural background rate.” The actual scientific view, as recorded in the IPCC report, is that, if the temperature were to rise by 1-3 degrees Centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and widespread coral mortality, unless corals could adopt or acclimatise, but that separating the impacts of climate change-related stresses from other stresses, such as over-fishing and polluting, is difficult.

This case was not a trial of the science and the conclusions were therefore of necessity limited. There are other, fuller critiques of Gore’s film and the fundamental untruth on which it is based, such as here.

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Gore— along with the wretched Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose own untruths would fill a book — perfectly symbolises a western world that has lost its reason and its capacity to tell truth from lies.

 

 In the intervening months, Kuentzel refined his original paper and brought it up to date. It is a brilliant and devastating piece of work. He framed it in the context of a Britain where — to the horror and amazement of Germany —an unholy alliance exists between the left and Islamic antisemites, giving rise in British discourse to a hardcore antisemitism which dehumanises and demonises Jews and which has a great deal in common with Nazi ideology. This, he says, is no accident.

 
Islamism, he says, was born during 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasser-ism but by the rise of Fascism and Nazism. It was established as a mass movement by the Muslim Brotherhood, which stands in relation to al Qaeda as the Bolsheviks did to communism. The Brotherhood is a  revolutionary political movement focused almost entirely on Zionism and the Jews. It is inspired by two sources: the Koran and Islamic theology, plus Nazi doctrine and influences, using not only Nazi-like patterns of action and slogans but also, historically, Nazi funding.

 

 

This Nazi/Islamist propaganda also made an impact in Iran, where it reached a certain Ayatollah Khomeini:

 In other words, as Kuentzel writes, the belief that the Muslim hatred of the Jews was triggered by Israel’s existence or behaviour is yet another western delusion.  The Muslim Brotherhood has ensured that the murderous prejudice at the heart of National Socialism lived on and gained even more influence in the Arab and Muslim world — and has also ensured that the deranged notion of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy has gained traction once again in Europe. As Kuentzel writes:

Some observers claim that political concessions by Israel would be enough to stop anti-Jewish hatemongering within the Arab-Islamic world. They are wrong. For Islamists, the issue at stake is not the welfare of individual Palestinians but the abolition of enlightenment, reason, and individual freedom – achievements whose spread is attributed primarily to the Jews. When even today Germans in Beirut, Damascus, and Amman are greeted with compliments for Adolf Hitler, this can hardly be Israel’s doing. When graffiti in Hampstead Garden Suburb combine swastikas with the words ‘kill all Jews’ and ‘Allah’ – what on earth has this to do with Zionism? Our historical excursion has, however, revealed that this combination is in no way accidental. The linkage of ‘kill all Jews’, ‘Allah’ and the swastika indicates a specific ideology, one that is connected both historically and ideologically with Nazism and needs to be opposed with equal determination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Mark Mardell’s euroblog (hat tip: James Forsyth), we learn that the refusal to allow the British people to say whether they wish to surrender to the EU what remains of their powers of self-government is not the least of the danger posed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown when it comes to Europe:

Keeping the door open for Turkey is a key aim of British foreign policy, and Brown is seriously worried that this is now under threat. I’m told he argues that there are three phases in the European Union project to create stability on the continent. The first was establishing democracy and prosperity after the war. The second was reuniting Europe after the iron curtain came down. But the third phase has only just started. That is to engage Muslims within Europe, both within existing borders, but also by making welcoming noises to Turkey, Albania and depending what happens there, Kosovo.  The French President Nicholas Sarkozy wants to put the kybosh on this. He’s demanding that the European Union sets up a group of ‘wise men’: a dozen senior statesmen to examine what Europe should look like in 10 to 20 years' time. That translates not too roughly as ‘Stop Turkey!’ and he makes few bones about it.

 

The French lion — and the British beef-eating surrender-monkey.

 

 

 

 

 

But we should not be surprised. Seventeenth century Europe successfully repulsed the Ottomans because it believed in itself. But as Daniel Pipes notes, in an important article about the cancer eating away at Israel’s sense of its own identity in common with the suicidal trend in European countries:

…the Netherlands' Princess Maxima, wife to the heir to the throne, announced to wide acclaim that ‘The Dutch identity does not exist.’

 

Well, at this rate it certainly soon will not.

 Al Qaeda and other jihadist circles have repeatedly referred to their aim of reconquering Spain —indeed, it was perfectly obvious that the Madrid atrocity was part of that agenda and nothing to do with Iraq. Spain is a prime target for the jihad because Andalus was an important part of the medieval Islamic caliphate. Even a children's magazine published by Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, called on Palestinian children to restore the city of Seville to Islamic rule as well as the rest of what was once Islamic Spain — underscoring the fact that Hamas, for all that it poses as a Palestinian nationalist movement, is first and foremost an Islamist movement for which the conquest of Israel is merely part of the broader agenda of re-establishing an Islamic empire that will dominate the world.

 

As I wrote here, the Palestinian territories are steadily being Islamised. That means the west is going to have to shift its focus very radically. The two-state solution is over. The Arabs have had ninety years to agree to it; all that time they have refused to do so; and now they’ve blown it. A state of Palestine would be another Islamist front and a further strategic threat to the west. Israel’s position as the forward salient of the west’s defence against the Islamist world thus becomes absolutely explicit. Far from a state of Palestine providing the west with greater peace and stability by ending the Middle East impasse, as so many in the west so naively believe, an Islamic state of Palestine would pose a mortal threat not just to Israel but to Europe. As Halevi writes: