Booker today offers what amounts to a tour de table on the state of play on "the so-called debate over global warming" (above – click to enlarge).

The point, of course, is that the warmists had their debate and lost it. Now they want a replay. But what perhaps is being underplayed is that, while this little spat is over millions of dollars, the amounts spent (and earmarked for spending) on global warming by governments and advocacy groups is in the hundreds of billions.

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Unfortunately, hundreds of billions is just the tip of the iceberg in financial terms. The amount of money required to be syphoned out of so-called rich economies and redistributed to so-called poor countries in order to create an even playing field of global per capita emissions is many times more than this.

What is even more sickening is the direct cost in human life of global climate policies - not least the rise in the cost of basic foodstuffs due to so much arable land being turned over to the production of biofuels and the opportunity missed of saving millions of human lives each year by spending a fraction of these sums in eradicating malaria and providing clean water to everyone on the planet, etc. (as detailed in 'cool it')

If at least 50% of the impoverished, soon to be destitute British public is concerned about all this, why do I not hear cries of outrage & anger?
Oh brother....do we have a long hard way to go.

They're all so engrossed in their Farcebook "games", they don't even realise what is going on!
I was chastised by my son for getting angry about it.
"People come on Farcebook*" for "fun" is what he told me.

*Actually he said "Facebook".

politics, the money just goes to their friends. Sam cams dad and his windfarms, little thomas doing his gap year for greenpeace, and all the little greenies running around pretending they are DOING SOMETHING. Another middle class gravy train, and boy, they just love gravy.

Facebook, BBM, Twitter, SMS, etc., the new opiates of the masses

The extent to which people spend their time in activities that are neither economically productive nor learning/teaching must be an indicator of decadence. I would contend that Facebook et al are major enablers of increasing decadence (I have three teenage children !!) and can only presage the even more rapid decline of western social democracies.

There will be a Facebook IPO later this year that might raise around $10billion for Zuckerberg (aka hoover $10bn out of the productive economy). Raising money in this way used to be to enable companies to increase their production in some way and therefore expand the overall economy. The only value Facebook has is as a vehicle for advertising, which of itself will increase costs and therefore effectively contract the economy.

I don't use facebook but twitter is a great source of new information. Whether that is about events in the middle east, or the team news for Portsmouth vs Leeds, well, that's up to you.

Whether you consider 120 characters as a great source of information depends on your point of view. In any event you are describing a learning use of the medium which, I'm afraid, the use of Twitter is generally and fundamentally not.

OT (and desperately unimportant):

Is the name Gleick pronounced gleek or glike? I always* assumed the latter, taking the diphthong rather as the Germans do (my proxy for Nordic etc languages, about which I know next to nothing).

But Richard's use of Tommy Cooper's duff ventrilloquist version of "Bleak House" in the title here (I assume that was the intended allusion?) has me wondering.

Can anyone here settle this?


* Gleick's brother, James, the science writer, is probably much better known. At least to me he is. I'd never heard of Peter Gleick before now.

Neither... it's pronounced Glick, like lick.

His Board of Directors has hung him out to dry.



By "stakeholders" in this context, I assume they mean Heartland Institute. Though they may be holding tar and feathers as well as sharp stakes and hammers.

But sure, they want to "maintain our commitment to the" gravy train of funding.

I too assumed Glick but the West Pondians say Gleek.

You are all sounding like a load of old whingeing Luddites. Whether you like it or not millions of people see value in these new ways of communicating, and the genie is not going back in the bottle. If people want to use them, well that's fine by me.

If you want to stick to the more general point that people aren't engaged with the political process then we're on the the same page, but this just makes you look like anti-progress curmudgeons.

I try to use Farcebook to communicate but people most emphatically do NOT communicate.

THIS is my experience of it and as I said, even my son who appreciates some of what's going on chastises me for getting angry that people aren't willing to engage.

Nope, they say Glick if they know him.


Listen 17 seconds in when he is introduced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm7lxwKgO5I

It's the same on other videos.