[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by freebeard

That's an awesome letter. Nobody does snark like the educated English. ...although, it is a little heavy on the commas.

Here, have a link to an article you might like on Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Eastern.

You may also like this letter written by the same author to a Bishop who proposed planting dozens of wind-turbines on locals who didn't want them - the CofE is a major landowner in the UK - and not very ethical either.

14 June 2012
Rt. Rev. Michael Langrish
Bishop of Exeter
The Bishop’s Office
The Palace
Exeter, UK

Dear Bishop Langrish,

Earlier in the week I listened to what you had to say following the welcome decision to withdraw the diocese’s application to erect wind turbines in Devon. I see that your remarks have now been republished in The Daily Telegraph. In particular, it is striking that you consider that you and your staff were subjected to abuse by objectors. Well, I was not part of any such exchanges and do not condone, in your own words, ‘bullying tactics’. On the other hand, I cannot help pointing out – to a churchman and so an ethical standard bearer, most especially – that such tactics are an absolutely routine component of the dialectical arsenal favoured by climate change proselytisers, amongst whose ranks the prelatariat of all denominations have constituted a prominent and discreditable cadre of alarmist partisans. Accordingly, whilst I will certainly not stoop to the use of opprobrious language, neither do I have any intention of pulling punches simply in deference to ‘the cloth’, if I may so put it.

Fortuitously, the story of your wind turbines has broken almost exactly with the publication of recent pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), supplemented by parallel pronouncements by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, another global warming alarmist body sustained, in this case, by the American government. These prompted me to write to my local MP, George Eustice – as you will know, an erstwhile press guru to David Cameron. Rather than going to the bother of re-inventing the wheel, as it were, what follows is a slightly altered text of what I wrote to him two days ago; the nature of the IPCC/NOAA pronouncements will become evident towards the end:

It is always intriguing to note how people such as yourself, who proselytise this issue, invariably settle for sweeping generalisation in preference to the more taxing task of addressing specifics; Yeo, for example, could give master classes in dissimulation. This has consequences. In an immediate sense, it makes it hard to decide whether you have understood my email of 8 June, which initiated this exchange or, indeed, have even read it.

Climate change major risks: Such as? There is not one shred of empirical evidence for your assertion. There is, of course, an ocean of mendacious and fraudulent computer modelling by people with vast vested interests in promoting the scam. These embrace individual scientists, to the lasting shame of each academia, scientific societies and publications, the prelatariat of all religious denominations (‘faith communities’, rather primly and sententiously I suppose we must now call them), NGOs, civil servants, politicians, the media and a number of industrial enterprises.

You state that you do not underestimate my ‘strength of feeling on this important issue’. With respect, you are well wide of the mark. I have no strong feelings about climate change. Climate change is fact of life and, in that sense, is a banality. I do, however, have a prejudice against blatant chicanery and outright knavery. You add that you, personally, do believe in dangerous human contribution to so-called climate change. In order to entertain such a proposition, you must accept that, within the context of a vast, chaotic system such as the atmosphere, minor changes to the concentration of a benign trace gas (let me remind you, in overall concentration amounting to less than 1/25th of a single percentage point) can of itself generate catastrophic climatic consequences; in any contemplated response, do please avoid the impulse to quote water vapour – for alarmist promoters like you, a very insecure, double sided argument! No, allow me to suggest, again with respect, that this is an intellectual construct which cannot be advanced with honesty of purpose. And yet, it is upon this vast inverted pyramid constructed on the summit of a sand dune that this disreputable government, as well as its lamentable predecessor, has founded the UK’s energy and economic policies.

Neither is this, anyway, a scientific issue. The science is clear. There have been and are no untoward changes in global climate outside those which flow from natural variability. There have been no recent climatic phenomena, which do not have numerous precedents. CO2 has nothing to do with the matter.

On the other hand it is an ethical issue. The ethical considerations arise from the activities of propagandists when:

they seek to howl down any form of questioning or dissent,
they use threatening vilification as a propagandist tool,
they damage the careers of those who have the temerity to question their dogma,
they wilfully and knowingly misrepresent data,
they wilfully and knowingly suppress contra-indicative data,
they claim data to be authentic and rigorous when, in reality, it is cherry picked from partisan environmentalist propaganda material,
they undermine scientific method by refusing to disclose and share data/methodology,
they wilfully subvert and prostitute their calling for personal gain and self-aggrandisement,
they subvert hitherto trusted forums of scientific discussion and dissemination,
they subvert the independence of peer review as a legitimate check and balance,
they abuse the young by indoctrinating deviant ‘science’,
they lay waste to the environment with worthless and hideously expensive machines (wind/tidal turbines) as well as other devices such as photo-voltaic cells,
they oppress the poor by diverting land usage from food crop cultivation to uneconomic and inefficient mono-crop cultivation of so-called biofuels,
they wilfully associate their personal conceits and financial interests with massive environmental pollution in the developing world,
they are complicit, for the same reasons, in rainforest and other forms of environmental destruction,
they manipulate the fiscal arrangements of entire countries on the basis of demonstrable falsehood,
they spread lies designed to intimidate poorly educated and/or gullible populations,
they claim economic insights based upon false assumptions, corrupted data and outright lies,
they sustain vast departments of state to promote falsehood and scaremongering,
they subsidise supposed independent pressure groups for the purpose of surreptitiously encouraging partisan lobbying,
they lend succour and support from the safety of privileged positions, inherited and otherwise, to villains and scientific charlatans,
they seek to close off and monopolise what should be legitimate debate on a controversial matter of importance, again from behind barricades created by privilege,
they ostentatiously ignore whatever is inconvenient to their tendentious paradigm, however distinguished and credible the sources may be,
they whitewash arrant knavery,
they distort, in furtherance of their mendacity, the normal accepted meaning of language,
they subvert the hitherto trusted organs of mass communication.

Well, enough to be getting on with, I suggest. The questions are how to mitigate the damage/how to hold to account those responsible for it!

So back briefly to my communication of 8 June. The point of that email was to draw to your attention a recent pronouncement – let it be stressed, not from a sceptical voice but from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after all your very own supposed primary source of information/wisdom in this matter, and backed up by none other than the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, another major climate alarm propagandist. And what were these two saying? Why, to be sure, that solar panels, one of the major supposed low carbon palliatives so much beloved by you and in such evidence in your own constituency, as by-products of their manufacture, are in reality delivering to the atmosphere what are now measurable quantities of greenhouse gases of a virulence representing entire orders of magnitude greater than any comparable effect produced by carbon dioxide which, in your declared philosophy, is the primary bugaboo. Moreover, these gases, in marked contrast to CO2, are entirely man made and are also vastly more long lasting.

As I stated at the outset of this message, it is not clear to me whether or not you grasped what was being said. In any event, if you can explain the logic of this wondrous contribution to the welfare of the planet, not to mention the rivers of treasure diverted to its promotion, I’d be interested to hear the case.

During the last few days, the papers have been awash with the C of E’s objections over the issue of whether or not a brace of homosexuals should be able to ‘marry’. As it happens, in relation to this specific issue, I am rather on your side. But, since I am also addressing a churchman, there also springs to mind the new testament reference to motes and beams. These, of course, are contained in a parable directed mainly at hypocrisy but which is also about relativities. What is being weighed in the scales is the comparatively minor issue of some aspect of personal conduct on the one hand and, on the other, the wilful corruption of the species’ greatest achievement, namely the forging of an instrument for the exploration of objective truth; I refer, of course, to scientific method. In terms of their relative importance, so disproportionate are these two contrasting alternatives that it seems almost ridiculous to consider them in the same sentence. And yet, you and your confreres agonise over the trivial and consider yourselves virtuous when you ignore the infinitely greater – indeed far worse, for, willy nilly, you take on board and promote a fallacious, corrupt and massively damaging pseudo-scientific proposition.

Of course, as the wind turbine affair makes clear, there is money potentially to be made from pursuing the global warming mythology and if, by nature or nurture, you are of a religious bent, I suppose that one mythology may be thought of as pretty much like another. In any event, I’m sure that cupidity in no way impacted upon the decision making processes of the diocese in its originally misguided efforts to reduce its ‘carbon footprint’. Clearly, though, the fatuousness of that soubriquet fails to strike you.

This letter is already long enough, so I will resist the urge to comment further – well, save perhaps to say that, with one shining exception, namely George Pell, Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, the positioning of the prelatariat in the so-called climate change controversy has been devoid of moral insight, but rich in sanctimonious self-preening.

Your own recent declarations are at one with that.

Yours sincerely,

R.C.E. Wyndham



cc. Archbishop of Canterbury Bishop of London Archbishop of Westminster As the spirit moves