The Enemy

You may have noticed (but probably haven't) that there hasn't been a new post on this blog for a while. I can assure you that there have been a couple of drafts lurking behind the curtain, but they're so damn ugly they'll never see the light of day without Sharon Osborne's surgeon. This one's had a face lift so here she is.

(if you were expecting something about the band here's a link to a funny review)

This post is my effort to hook some environmental issues in the world of politics and see how hard I can pull before the line brakes and I end up soggy and swimming (I went fishing the other weekend).

This whole diatribe is a bit outside the remit I set for this blog, but the last movies I saw were The Dark Knight Rises and True Grit and neither of them can be twisted, even in this bastardising rant factory, to yield environmental themes..... although....... anyway.

In researching 'the enemy' there were a number of anti-environmentalist arguments which pissed me off. That number equalled the sum total of all their arguments, and that number was two.

First, that the people telling us about the sad state of the world's environment are scare mongering to make money for their respective NGOs, when the reality is that the world is robust place that humans cannot irreparably damage and the environment is better now than it was a hundred years ago (they cite the industrial revolution).
Second, that environmental conservation is the device of the upper/middle class to protect their assets and deny the lower classes development opportunities. 


While - as it turns out - I'm not going to make it as a scientist, I have spent my whole life around them. This has made one thing abundantly clear, that scientists are, surprisingly enough, empirical. Anyone who is not empirical is not a scientist and these people are shunned by the community like a smelly kid with an unfashionable lunch box.

This being the case, the IPCC, a massive independent body of scientists have stated that anthropogenic climate change is 99.9% certain. Ahh, but there's still a chance it's not true, you might say. That chance is like blindfoldedly spinning round in room and hitting a bee with a bamboo cane in one swipe. Outside of a sports movie who'd bet everying on a chance like that?

George Monbiot put it this way: "the evidence for manmade global warming is as strong as the evidence for Darwinian evolution, or for the link between smoking and lung cancer."

Lobbyists for fossil fuel companies don't understand an approach that presents all the facts, which is why, when an IPCC scientist honestly says, ok this test didn't conclusively prove that global warming is caused by people they swarm over it and use it to seed doubt in people's minds. Let alone the thousands of experiments with results to the contrary, and the fact that they might harbour a secret understanding that we are causing climate change, they've got profits to think about.

The second argument is harder to deal with because there are instances where it's true. But before you spit in the face of the next hippy on the street trying to sign you up with Greenpeace shouting 'you phony, you're bloody loaded, save the whales yourself!', it's important to note that in these rare instances it is not the people that grind on each year on crap salaries just because they want to work at a charity. It's governments, land owners and vested interests with big marketing budgets.

An example of government misrepresentation of conservation is Diego Garcia.



Before the US and UK governments got there  it was inhabited (see linked letter), now the people who have the greatest claim to the islands (the Chagossians) might actually win their case to go home, the area around the islands has been designated a marine protection area, meaning that even if they did go back their main livelihood (fishing) would be prohibited. This effectivly keeps them homeless.

This is just wrong. Contrary to what the anti-environmentalist lobby say, most conservationists do care about people more than animals they just understand that nature's resources are just as finite as your monthly pay check. You can deplete it, but if you spend faster than resources accumulate then you'll be in debt, and the current state of affairs shows us what a whole lot of joy that is.

The next blog will be more fun. Please feel free to contradict my arguments, I haven't been scientific with my hitting-a-bee-with-a-blindfold-on probability calculations, and that's just one example of why I'll leave science to the professionals.