The idiocy continues

Since humans began to farm several thousand years ago, we’ve become increasingly better off. 

With progress comes problems, and one of the pesky problems that accompanies “easy food” is active imaginations and an insatiable desire for entertainment – preferably real-life drama. 

So it’s no surprise that, in response to the demand, clever people cook up entertainingly frightful scenarios for us to dwell on. I suppose it started in earnest with John writing Revelation. Nostradamus got in on some action. Malthus was the king of dire. Carson’s Silent Spring continues to flow. Michael Moore is the modern version (complete with special effects!) of all the above. Global cooling, acid rain, ozone holes, alar on apples, Y2K, England winning the Ashes … the list goes on and on.

While each one has its own chills (and cost), three are worth highlighting for their sheer audacity, if not simply their entertainment value.

Peak Oil

We’re going to run out of fossil fuels in 10 years, which will be disastrous, so we’ve got to stop using them now.

Does this make any sense to any thinking person? “The King’s going to behead me in 10 years time, so I’ll kill myself today!” Yeah, that’ll sure show him!

Obviously, the “simply warning people of the impending end of the modern world due to peak oil” train ran out of steam. It was just too darn easy to see that, 10 years down the track, we hadn’t even come close to running out of fossil fuels.

AGW

Enter Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Now we had to stop using fossil fuels NOT because we were running out of them, but because the use of them was going to cause the world to implode (which apparently is very bad for human health and the environment). 

The lunatics are in charge of the asylum comes to mind frequently, especially when I see official reports such as The Critical Decade released this week by the Gillard Government’s “independent” Climate Commission.

Is anyone surprised that Chairman (how appropriate!) Tim Flannery (a non-climate scientist who berates other non-climate scientists for their dogged insistence upon adherence to the scientific method and their preference for observed results over wild modelling) released his first report with a few doomsday scenarios painted in?

This is the man who predicted that, due to man-made climate change:

• 2004: “there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century’s first ghost metropolis.”
   
• 2007 (the year he was named Australian of the Year): Brisbane’s “water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months” (Brisbane’s $1.2 billion plant is currently mothballed due to excessive rainfall).
   
• April 2008:  “This may be the Arctic’s first ice-free year.” (I think we might have heard about this, had it come to pass!)

Flannery also pushed for “straightforward” green geothermal alternative energy and one of his stock holdings, Geodynamics, was granted $90 million by Chairman then-PM Rudd to tap the hot rocks. The project has run into a host of problems, not the least of which is too much rainfall.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, when questioned by Andrew Bolt about his belief in climate change, stated his unequivocal faith in the alarmist scenarios, and then seemed utterly confused as to why he’d be questioned about his recent purchase of a nice house at sea level:

Andrew Bolt: Are you personally convinced that man is heating the world and heating it dangerously?

Greg Combet: Yes, I am.

Bolt: Why did you then buy a beachside house?

Combet: WHAT?

Bolt: Your house in Newcastle on the beachside?

Combet: What on earth has that got to do with anything?

Bolt: RISING SEAS, Greg, of up to 100 metres by the next century …

Combet: That’s just ridiculous!

Not exactly the equivalent of Pascal’s Wager.

Despite all the desperate flailing and haranguing by Flannery and his core cabal of faithful comrades, even the UN has moved on a bit, recognising that the people’s BS detector has finally kicked in on this topic.

Agroecology

Hence, a new tactic from the 666-page UN play book (originally published 1972 at Geneva, fully edited 1992 at Rio de Janeiro) is selected and introduced. Sustainable Agriculture, which handily incorporates all the catch-phrases of the environmental movement – biodiversity, water scarcity, endangered species, poor African women and children – into the newly-coined “agroecology” concept.

The Special Rapporteur to the UN’s Right to Food (no, I am NOT making this up!) reported that the only way to meet the coming food shortage (due to the world’s growing population) is to go back in time. Modern Agriculture is bad (well, most of it … the UN will get to decide which types of tractors are permitted, and which technology gets the tick of approval). The Green Revolution was apparently a huge mistake … very unsustainable (to use one of their favourite nondescript words).

The answer, of course, is to turn total control over to the UN. They have conducted in-depth scientific studies that show that food production can double in 10 years, but only if governments around the world force farmers to use the UN’s ideas!

Now the Federal Government, still caught up in the mania of climate change, does not know what their bureaucrats are signing onto behind the scenes. But you can bet that in the next few years, Flannery II will be hired to peddle the propaganda to Australians: “If we do not act immediately (to force all property owners to adopt agroecology), Gaia will chew us up and spit us out.”

As far as entertaining doomsday scenarios go, it will take the cake.