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Poor old AC Grayling, well behind the curve

We need to make democracy work in the fight to save the planet
AC Grayling
For centuries, humans have championed the democratic political system. But can it facilitate the radical change needed to stop the potentially annihilating effects of climate change?

And everyone’s got to be re-educated into saving the planet and so on.

What’s completely missing is what we’ve also heard this morning. Assume that you do buy the whole story. We’ve still already turned the corner.

To put it into a bit of jargon. The entire IPCC structure tells us that, using the older SRES, we need to get the economy off the A1FI track and onto the A1T track. Once we’ve done that we’re done, we’ve solved our problem. As best we can see what with the spreaqd of renewables, the drop in solar price, fracking for gas and all that, w are on the A1T, not A1FI. Therefore, we’re done.

It is actually accurate to state that we’ve already solved climate change.

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Mr Ecks
Mr Ecks
8 years ago

It is vastly more accurate to say that there is no such thing as man-made climate change. That it is all lying leftist cockrot designed to attack Western Civilisation and scientific progress. Real progress not the evil Marxian regression to filth and poverty deliberately and deceitfully called “progressivism”.

Therefore the time approach when it is the climate change freakshow that needs to start seeing the inside of jails.

Rather than laughable attempts to label the sane, perceptive and intelligent with the ludicrous concept of “deniers”.

MC
MC
8 years ago

I suspect AC Grayling’s ‘working democracy’ would look and feel suspiciously similar to Stalinist oppression. Only with betrayal of Gaia, rather than betrayal of the Party, cited when the knock on the door came.

David Moore
David Moore
8 years ago

Their goal has nothing to do with climate change.

David Moore
David Moore
8 years ago

MC, I think PolPot gave that one a go back in the 70’s, he was just ahead of his time…..

Rob Harries
8 years ago

Give him a break.

He is just a random citizen passing on his expectedly confused and shit views on areas he has no experience, expertise and authority in.

How would you feel if you were encouraged to write articles way outside you domain specialism because some editor stupidly thought that a professor of philosophy has an interesting and valuable view about such things?

You have to feel sorry for him….

DevonChap
DevonChap
8 years ago

He buys into the shit that dictatorships are more efficient than democracy. They really aren’t. Either they are a raging mass of infighting between groups (as Nazi Germany) or they are a clique with groupthink who don’t consider alternative paths (as per Soviet Union and China today). The result might be quick decisions but almost certainly bad ones. What is absolutely certain is they don’t consider the actual wants of the little people.

AC Grayling wants a clique who share his groupthink to be our dictators for our own good. Democracy isn’t working since we don’t agree with him.

Ljh
Ljh
8 years ago

The really sickening bit is that propaganda has been substituted for the scientific method in schools. Kids are taught that “green” is wonderful virtue signalling. There’s a whole generation of Eloi emerging from the education system as keen for green fascism as Grayling.

DevonChap
DevonChap
8 years ago

Ljh. Too true. My son was elected to his school’s ‘Fair Trade Eco School Council’. I took great joy when, channelling his father, he told them that Fair Trade wasn’t fair. My right wing indoctrination works!

Rob
Rob
8 years ago

I think Brexit has deranged him. The tyrannical dictatorship he desires is not to solve “climate change” but Brexit and the British people. They are the problem.

There are a remarkable and disturbing number of people with influence who have been coming out with stuff like this over the past year.

Mr Ecks
Mr Ecks
8 years ago

Hence the need for the equation:

Treason+Sedition=Jail

Diogenes
Diogenes
8 years ago

Rob, does Grayling have any influence? He has a twitter account and a bunch of fawning admirers but influence?

Diogenes
Diogenes
8 years ago

Actually 39.5k Twitter followers compared to Lineker’s 6.5 million or Snippa’s 45.2k or Polly’s 150k or Tim’s 5884

The Meissen Bison
The Meissen Bison
8 years ago

For centuries, humans have championed the democratic political system.

Hmmm. Doubtful.

Hallowed Be
Hallowed Be
8 years ago

DevonChap: See if your son can propose a name change to@ Free trade, cheapest possible energy and materials (taking into account externalities) student council.

Tomsmith
Tomsmith
8 years ago

Ahaha, we are unexpectedly richer than they expected and can easily afford their climate change nonsense.

There were some desperate eco ‘scientists’ and other assorted authoritarian charlatans on the radio this morning as I drove the kids to school trying to keep the dream alive but coming across like shrill little pricks instead. Even the little one noticed the weird tone of voice and shouty turn of phrase.

BraveFart
BraveFart
8 years ago

A blinkered opinionated philosopher with no objectivity or intellectual rigour – is this an oxymoron?

The standard of some of our tertiary sector “academics” seems to be right down the fvcking pan these days.

Knowing Me, Knowing Steve
Knowing Me, Knowing Steve
8 years ago

the battle to minimise human-induced climate change has to be a worldwide endeavour among cooperating states. The outcome of the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference was one of the most optimistic and encouraging steps hitherto achieved in that battle

That’s the Paris Agreement which is projected to cost $3 trillion and achieve… not very much of anything to slow the rise in global temperatures. But it will create a massive financial bubble in “green” technology bullshit as we scramble to replace our infrastructure with less efficient and dearer alternatives, so won’t someone think of the international financiers?

It is thought that climate catastrophes caused turmoil in the past – perhaps at the beginning of the fourth millennium BCE, and in the early 12th century BCE

Probably caused by Stone Age and Bronze Age motorists. Fuckin’ Fred Flintstone didn’t listen.

Only this time – today, in our present world, with a global population of over seven billion that is growing ever faster – any such catastrophe will be many orders of magnitude greater.

Rilly? People with a bit of money in their pocket and the benefits of modern technology and global trade will be harder hit by weather than primitive hunter gatherers or subsistence farmers? Citation needed.

President Trump’s announcement illustrates the fragility of international cooperation. It takes just one large rogue elephant in the herd to negate the endeavour. Any one of the US, China, India and the EU could undermine the sacrifice and determination demanded by the Paris agreement.

Under the Paris Agreement, China and India get to build all the coal-burning power plants they want for decades to come. The EU and the US (prior to President Trump’s decision to withdraw) were expected to slit their own economic throats on the promise that Asian economies would – one day, pinky swear! – do the same.

What a deal! And amazingly, the idiot billionaire dealmaker-president passed on the opportunity to raise the cost of living in his own country while exporting the rest of American industry to China. Thankfully, we have the strong and stable Theresa May, the Prime Minister Cupid Stunt tried to warn us about.

It is a desperately sad move by any one large polluting economy if it refuses to cooperate. Such a decision condemns – actually condemns, not merely threatens to condemn – hundreds of millions of people to suffering, and almost certainly the whole planet to new dark ages.

No doubt our Hezeltine-haired Oxford don fancies himself a sort of philosophical Vigo of Carpathia in the new Dark Ages, as he launches into a long, gay paean to tyranny while claiming to abhor tyranny.

I dunno. I suspect mass democracy has a shelf-life, but not for the reasons Grayling supposes. Seems to me it was a bad idea to give a vote to everyone over 18 with a pulse, because the temptation to vote ourselves largesse at the expense of future generations will eventually lead to ruin. The plan now is to turn England into the Middle East-cum-Middle Earth in the hope that illiterate clit-choppers will pay our pensions somehow. That probably won’t happen, but at least they’ve made riding the Tube more exciting.

But I still agree with Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill about all the other systems of government that have been tried.

dearieme
dearieme
8 years ago

“It is actually accurate to state that we’ve already solved climate change.” Oh yippee. Then let’s get in a time machine and nip back to correct the nasty climate change after the Minoan warm spell, the Roman warm spell, and the Medieval warm spell.

John B
John B
8 years ago

‘Making’ democracy work is Fascism, particularly when the ‘makers’ decide what it is that has to work and who had to be made to do it.

Dennis the Peasant
8 years ago

Nothing says “I know science!” like a career writing books about Philosophy.

Dennis the Peasant
8 years ago

I’d bet money AC Grayling couldn’t give the proper definition of either a dependent variable or an independent variable, much less correctly identify either in the simplest scientific experiment you could put in front of him.

bilbaoboy
bilbaoboy
8 years ago

You have Tony Heller at RealClimateScience drilling down into the historic data supplied by NOAA (the US is one of the few places with long historic data sets). This data has been ‘adjusted’ by NOAA and gives global warming. Tony (Steve Goddard when he tweets) has designed and made available his own software and presented the real original data every which way and since 1936 the US has been getting cooler. He does it year-on-year, day by day in one place day after day, aggregating all the stations…. It doesn’t matter, there is no global warming man-made or otherwise.

He also points out that warming is claimed in places where there are NO stations!!!

He follows Arctic sea ice. Interesting too.

Turning to Jonova in Australia, the thermometers were set not to register temperatures below -10º. Funny that!. Digital thermometers take a one second heat burst from a passing lorry (or similar) and register the temperature when old thermometers took 7 minutes to register a change thereby eliminating any anomalies.

It just goes on and on.

As Heller says nobody will debate him, they just insult him. Nobody has ever proved he is wrong.

Oh and one of the real climate scientists who worked with the original and current scaremongers at NASA has just outed them as incompetent, travel-junkies and activists.

Girls & boys, popcorn time is coming round!

Bloke no Longer in Austria
Bloke no Longer in Austria
8 years ago

Also Bilbaoboy, it seems that the Aussi Met Office’s electronic thermometers have never been callibrated and so their results over the last 20 years are spurious.

Anyway Grayling – he has form in getting it wrong like this. He was on German telly a few years ago droning on about the bombing campaign. It passed me by at the time, but he had written a book on the air campaign in 2006 where the main argument was that killing large numbers of German citizens was not a very nice thing to do. Yawn.

Of course the whole problem with such arguments is one of projection. Until the invasion of Sicily, bombing was the only way that the fight could be taken to an Axis homeland and that if Harris had had the resources and executed a few more Operation Gomorrahs in rapid succession the war may well have ended in 1943 etc etc, you all know this stuff…

I once had a huge argument with a Yank friend of my missus, who basically parrotted the immorality of bombing line. I was so fed up with his whining that I told him that it didn’t matter if we had killed every man, woman and child in Germany as long as it ended the Nazi regime and that the Germans were lucky the war ended when it did, because Ludwigshafen was slated to receive the first Big One.

And another thing, why doesn’t he get a decent haircut, he can bloody afford one.

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[…] AC Grayling in the Graun, h/t Timmy. And it’s the thing you’ve read so many times before, the idea that Democracy is great […]

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