An Ode to Joy this is not

As we all know, in two days’ time Obama is to make a speech of cosmic significance in Cairo. The run-up to this speech has been characterised by some epic spinning from shadowy American and Israeli ‘sources’ which has been creating a powerful bow-wave of feverish speculation and alarm. The Israelis are apparently shocked and appalled by Obama’s demand – transmitted through Hillary Clinton, no less – that not only should Israel build no new settlements but must not allow the current ones to expand through natural growth. In other words, a thinly disguised requirement for ethnic cleansing through a policy of slow strangulation.

If Israel’s government really is shocked and appalled by this, I would regard that as the most shocking and appalling thing of all, since Obama’s irrational beliefs that a) removing the settlers is the route to a Palestinian state and b) such a state will end the Arab war against Israel and help defeat Iran, not to mention c) his ignorance of international law dating back to the still legally binding Mandate giving the right of Jewish settlement throughout the whole of (then) Palestine which includes present day West Bank and Gaza, have been crystal clear since way before his election. (As for Hillary, since she was against Israel’s interests before she was for them -- which by an astounding coincidence took place while she was Senator for New York – and is now against them again, who can be surprised?)

According to this Washington Post story, Mahmoud Abbas confirmed that Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, offered the Palestinians 97 per cent of the West Bank for a Palestinian state, plus ‘the right of return’ and large-scale Palestinian immigration into Israel – yet still this wasn’t enough for the Palestinians. So how can Obama maintain that all now hinges on the dismantling of the settlements and the construction of a Palestine state, when clearly this is not what the Palestinians want at all?

So yes, all as predictable as it is alarming. As for the claim by Mahmoud Abbas that Obama is trying to bring down Netanyahu by setting the more nationalistic Likudniks against him, thus bringing to power the ineffable Tzipi Livni who shares Obama’s world-view, I wouldn’t disbelieve that either. And the reported threat to punish Israel by cutting US military aid is precisely what his guru Samantha Power is on record as having proposed.

On the other hand, however, all this is still just spin. If the US were to punish Israel for not agreeing to commit national suicide, the real Israel lobby in America -- the Christian heartlands – would go nuts. Plus the relationship between the two countries is not a one-way street: if Israel were to stop sharing its intelligence with the US, for example, the reaction of the US military would likely dwarf even their fury with Obama over publishing ‘torture’ pictures or shutting down the military tribunals. Given that a strategic game is being played vis a vis Iran, every pronouncement or shadowy bit of spin surely has to be regarded as inherently unreliable. But the mood music is all playing one tune, and it sure isn’t the Ode to Joy.

It was a grim commentary on the current British contribution to peace in the Middle East that it took the BBC this morning to make Obama seem quite reasonable in relation to Israel. In an interview, the BBC‘s North American editor Justin Webb pressed Obama to say what he would do to force Israel to keep its commitments under the Road Map, given (and here his voice rose in righteous indignation) that Israeli ministers had been declaring flat-out that Israel would refuse to bend under Obama’s bullying statesmanlike peace initiative. No mention of the claim by Mahmoud Abbas that Obama was apparently intent on producing regime change in Israel (to the BBC, it seems, regime change is only a crime when used against genocidal tyrants -- but of no interest whatever when contemplated against their victims).

No mention by Justin Webb that the Palestinians were in breach of their commitments which are rather more fundamental than settlements, being the requirement to stop waging a war of extermination against Israel. It took Obama to murmur that the Palestinians had to stop their incitement to hatred and murder – something he said a day or so ago, and it is notable and encouraging that he said it; although he’s still not indicating that, as per the Road Map, the Palestinians are required to dismantle their infrastructure of war before Israel is expected to do anything in its turn.

What is also highly troubling about Obama’s imminent trip is not just his speech in Cairo but where he is going after that. For his next stop is Buchenwald – and straight after that, Dresden. Dresden? Why on earth Dresden of all places?  One reason only, surely. The symbolism is unmistakeable – the site of the most controversial Allied bombing of World War Two. It looks horribly like Obama intends to make a symbolic statement of reproach for that event – just to go there makes the point, without even saying anything -- and even worse, to make some kind of equation with the slaughter at Buchenwald. One holocaust doesn't deserve another, would seem to be the unspoken message, would it not? Or to put it another way, if Jews defend themselves by military means, they turn into Nazis.

In the light of Iran’s genocidal threats against Israel and the nuclear weapons that Obama is giving it the time to assemble to make good those threats, such symbolism would be unspeakable – and another feather of western defeatism for a gloating Iran to stick in its cap.

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The modern heresy of true science

Every so often, a book is published which, it is instantly clear, is the definitive last word on the subject. Such a book has just appeared on the global lunacy of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In his devastating study Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science (Quartet) Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and previously Professor of Earth Sciences at the Universities of Melbourne and Newcastle systematically shreds the theory and the hallucinatory propaganda industry it has spawned. There is simply nothing left of it when he has finished – and he does so from the perspective of real science which the theory has so shockingly betrayed.

Having painstakingly out the actual scientific facts and evidence involved in the study of climate, he concludes his book with a sustained peroration of fury and contempt at the way such scientific evidence has been dismissed in a breathtaking campaign of ‘cognitive dissonance’. As he says, there is not one shred of actual scientific evidence to sustain the claim of AGW, which rests in its entirety upon charlatanry, fraud, ignorance and ideology. Here are some tasters of this invaluable book.

‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology’

he writes. The world has been warming, slightly and intermittently, and also cooling, since the Little Ice Age. Nothing new there. Sea level, ice sheets and life on earth have also changed slightly. Nothing new there. The claims that the seas are rising and the ice retreating in any extraordinary fashion are all demonstrably false. The theory rests on the categorical assertion that rising carbon dioxide levels result in a warming of the atmosphere. Yet although carbon dioxide levels have been increasing, there has been no significant warming since 1995 and none at all since 1998.

That is because the claimed cause and effect between carbon dioxide and global warming is simply false. History shows us that there is no relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature. Proponents of the theory, he writes, have to explain why the Minoan Warming, Roman Warming and Medieval Warming all produced warmer temperatures than now. Why the temperature rose from 1860 to 1875, decreased from 1875 to 1890, rose until 1903, fell until 1918 and then rose dramatically until 1941. Why the rate and amount of warming at the beginning of the 20^th century was greater than now despite lower carbon dioxide emissions. Why the world cooled from 1941-1976, the year of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Why the temperature rose from 1976 to 1998, then cooled. And so on.

As he says, the whole theory was created not by the scientific methods of observation and gathering actual evidence but by dubious computer modelling. These models suggested constant warming until the end of time but predicted neither post 1998 cooling nor El Nino events.

‘This alone shows that the computer models are only sophisticated computer games with input based on the programmer’s predilections. The significant manipulation of the source data and the lack of use of many known variables exacerbate uncertainties and can produce the predestined outcome before the model can be run. This is a common flaw of mathematical modelling. Models with simulations, projections and predilections prove nothing. All a model shows is something about the model itself, normally its limitations. Data collection in science is derived from observation, measurement and experimentation, not from modelling...If computer models torture the date enough, the data will confess to anything.

... ‘How do you explain that global temperatures according to the IPCC have not increased since 1998 and that there has been no significant warming since 1995? Are you aware that even the IPCC does not consider climate models to be “predictions” or “forecasts” but merely “emission scenarios”? Are you aware of the numerous studies from science and history that show that in the Medieval Warming it was warmer than today and that this was a time with no cars or industrialisation? How do you explain that CO2 levels have been much higher in the earth’s history and have not coincided with extinctions and warm periods? Why has Greenland cooled since the 1940s? Why was the Arctic warmer than now in the 1920s and 1930s? What has Antarctic sea ice expanded to record levels in recent years? Why has Arctic sea ice expanded since 2008?’

The evidence is all around us that the theory is sheer bunkum from start to finish. But, writes Plimer – and this is the real cause of his burning anger -- scientific facts no longer seem to be necessary. They are simply dismissed, to create a belief system purporting to be ‘science’ but which is more akin to a religion sustained through the imposition of authority and intimidation – and anti-scientific claims of a settled ‘consensus’. Such a ‘consensus’ is itself bogus. It is claimed, for example, that the IPCC reports have been written by 2500 scientists. In fact, says Plimer, they are the product of a tiny number of people .

‘If governments had read the fine print of the crucial chapter 5 of IPCC AR4 (Humans Responsible for Climate Change) they would have realised that it is based on the opinions of just five independent scientists...whose computer models have not been able to accurately predict the cooling that has occurred since 1998.... What is not stated is that the predictions of climate scientists about a human-induced climate catastrophe are somewhat tainted by their own patronage arrangements with politicians, governments, NGOs and research organisations that have invested heavily in a global warming catastrophe'.

He concludes:

‘When science was born, the consensus at that time was driven by religion, politics, prejudice, mysticism and self-interested power. From Galileo to Newton and through the centuries, science debunked the consensus by experiment, calculation, observation, measurement, repeated validation, falsification and reason... Scientific fact now no longer seems to be necessary. Human-induced global warming is one such example, where one camp attempts to demolish the basic principles of science and install a new order based on political and sociological collectivism...There has been an uncritical, unthinking acceptance by the community of the media barrage about catastrophic climate change. For many, critical thinking is an anathema’.

Politicians -- not least the ludicrously styled ‘Ministers for Climate Change’-- along with the government’s Chief Scientist, the President of the Royal Society and the rest of the credulous intelligentsia should pack this book in their suitcases for their summer holiday reading. That is, of course, if they still have any capacity to think.

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