MONCKTON DEBUNKS GLOBAL WARMING ECONOMICS

Christopher Monckton, Viscount Brenchley, continues his dispassionate dissection of the foolishness in Sir Nicholas Stern's economic analysis of the global warming conundrum in this week's Sunday Telegraph. In brief:

By 2035, says Sir Nick, temperature will have risen by "over 2C". It sounds alarming. What he means, though, is over 2C since 1750, when we don't know what the temperature was. Stern's 485 parts per million by 2035 is based on the UN's worst case. Even then, the increase compared with today would be just 0.7C. On the UN's lower projection, implying 425ppm by 2035, only 0.3C.

The UK accounts for just 2 per cent of global emissions, and falling. Even if Britain stopped using energy altogether, global temperature by 2035 would be six thousandths of a degree C less than if we carried on as usual. If we shut down once a week on Planet Day, make that less than one thousandth of a degree. Even if every Western country complied with Kyoto (and most won't), Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma says temperature a century from now would be a 25th of a degree lower than without Kyoto.

But do read the whole thing. Viscount Brenchley also includes a 77-page pdf file of e-mails he received following publication of his first article last week.

The views of 200 readers who emailed me are in the link above. About a third are scientists, including well-known climatologists and a physicist who confirmed my calculations. Some advise governments.

Nearly all condemn the "consensus". Most feel that instead of apologising, the UN has misled them, especially by using the defective "hockey-stick" temperature graph.

Global Warming Hysteria is advanced by the left in order to give them yet another reason to place all human activity under the control of a bureaucratic elite.

In the XIXth Century, and through the first half of the XXth Century, statists in the United States (an elsewhere) promulgated the idea that a rational society required a "dictatorship of the proletariat" so that the economy could be controlled by wise men who knew better than the market. The idea became quite popular in Europe, and spawned communism, fascism, and National Socialism. But it never caught on in the United States.

By the 1950s, it was obvious even to the American communists that communism had turned Russia and Eastern Europe into a hellhole. "No More Since Hungary." Besides which, the American worker had never been fooled by communist propaganda.

So instead of promulgating a worker-controlled demand-economy, leftists created a "new left" based not on economic justice but on social issues like civil rights, disarmament, and, eventually, opposition to the War in Vietnam.

This was a Gramscian movement. Following the path outlined by the Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, the New Left engaged in a cultural struggle to disrupt and destroy the cultural bases of America's successful free market society, in order to replace them with a new, revolutionary culture. That culture war continues.

Gramsci argued that the failure of the workers to make anti-capitalist revolution was due to the successful capture of the workers' ideology, self-understanding, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling) culture. In other words, the perspective of the ruling class had been absorbed by the masses of workers. In "advanced" industrial societies hegemonic cultural innovations such as compulsory schooling, mass media, and popular culture had indoctrinated workers to a false consciousness. Instead of working towards a revolution that would truly serve their collective needs, workers in "advanced" societies were listening to the rhetoric of nationalist leaders, seeking consumer opportunities and middle-class status, embracing an individualist ethos of success through competition, and/or accepting the guidance of bourgeois religious leaders.

Well, that didn't work either. Communism finally collapsed in the Soviet Union (and in China, and almost everywhere else except for North Korea, Cuba, and Zimbabwe) and although the "Movement" advanced a variety of causes, America remained a basically conservative bastion of free-market economics. The left is splintered into a bewildering array of factions and fractions, each dedicated to one or another narrowly focused special interest. There was no unifying cause around which to orchestrate the need for bureaucratic domination of the world's economy.

That's what the left thinks it has found in "global warming." It is part of their luddite religious belief that prosperity is bad and that the pristine poverty and ignorance of the masses must be maintained in order that the elite might better manage every detail of daily life.

But unlike the other-worldly promises of other forms of belief-based ideologies, communism promised a material reward in this world -- and when it didn't materialize, communism collapsed.

There are already signs that the Earth is beginning to cool off again, and that the recent warm period of 1975-2000 is over.

Perhaps after a cool 5 years or so, the left will move on to another fantasy.