#matthew ridley

[globalzombie]

❝ ... I am not here attempting to resolve the climate debate, nor saying that catastrophe is impossible. I am testing my optimism against the facts, and what I find is that the probability of rapid and severe climate change is small; the probability of net harm from the most likely climate change is small; the probability that no adaptation will occur is small; and the probability of no new low-carbon energy technologies emerging in the long run is small. Multiply those small probabilities together and the probability of a prosperous twenty-first century is therefore by definition large. You can argue about just how large, and therefore about how much needs to be spent on precaution; but you cannot on the IPCC’s figures make it anything other than very probable that the world will grow in be a better place in 2100 than it is today. ❞

Matthew Ridley, The Rational Optimist, 2010

[globalzombie]

❝ The human tendency to seek intentional explanations of the weather is as old as time. ‘Each natural event is supposed to be governed by some intelligent agent,’ wrote David Hume. Somewhere deep in our psyches, we have just never really accepted that a thunderstorm does not have an agency behind it, that a drought is not a punishment for some misdemeanour. It’s the intentional stance again. In the old days it was Zeus or Jehovah or the rain gods. In the sixteenth century it was witches: the historians Wolfgang Behringer and Christian Pfister discovered that organised witch-hunting and the burning of supposed witches as scapegoats in Europe correlated neatly with episodes of bad weather and failed harvests during the climate cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Peasant communities suffering damage from climatic change often pressed authorities for the organisation of witch-hunts.

Even in the eighteenth century any natural disaster was assumed by most people and most leaders to be divine retribution for sin: Leibniz’s theodicy demanded it. For a brief lull in the twentieth century the rational view prevailed that weather was just weather, and nobody’s fault. But with the new tendency to blame every storm and flood on emissions of carbon dioxide, that lull is over, and the sigh of relief that we can go back to blaming each other for the weather is almost audible. The huge appeal of the ‘extreme weather’ meme of recent years comes from the fact that it plays into this divine-retribution mentality.

The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population: not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better. ❞

Matthew Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, 2015

[globalzombie]

❝ ... how religious climate-change arguments are becoming. We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irresponsible consumerism), atone (by paying carbon taxes), repent (insisting that politicians pay lip service to climate-change alarm), and seek salvation (sustainability). The wealthy can buy indulgences (carbon offsets) so as to keep flying their private jets, but none must depart from faith (in carbon dioxide) as set out in scripture (the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It is the duty of all to condemn heretics (the ‘deniers’), venerate saints, [Greta Thunberg], heed the prophets (of the IPCC). If we do not, then surely Judgement Day will find us out (with irreversible tipping points), when we will feel the fires of hell (future [bushfires]) and experience divine wrath (worsening [bushfires]). Fortunately, God has sent us a sign of the sacrifice we must make – I have sometimes been struck by the way a wind farm looks like Golgotha. ❞

Matthew Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, 2015

[globalzombie]

“At the heart of the debate about climate change is a simple scientific question: can a doubling of the concentration of a normally harmless, indeed moderately beneficial, gas, from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.06% of the atmosphere over the course of a century change the global climate sufficiently to require drastic and painful political action today? In the end, that’s what this is all about. Most scientists close enough to the topic say: possibly. Some say: definitely. Some say: highly unlikely. The ‘consensus’ answer is that the warming could be anything from mildly beneficial to dangerously harmful: that’s what the IPCC means when it quotes a range of plausible outcomes from 1.5 to 4 degrees of warming.

On the basis of this unsettled scientific question, politicians and most of the pressure groups that surround them are furiously insistent that any answer to the question other than ‘definitely’ is vile heresy motivated by self-interest, and is so disgraceful as to require stamping out, prosecution as a crime against humanity, investigation under laws designed to catch racketeering by organized crime syndicates, or possibly the suspension of democracy. For yes, that is what has been repeatedly proposed by respected and senior figures in the climate debate.”

Matthew Ridley, The Climate Wars And The Damage To Science, 2015

[globalzombie]

‎The Delingpod: The James Delingpole Podcast: Delingpod 27: Matt Ridley, the Rational Optimist on Apple Podcasts

‎Show The Delingpod: The James Delingpole Podcast, Ep Delingpod 27: Matt Ridley, the Rational Optimist - 11 Jul 2019

[fleekpoint]

the secret agent