"Stone Age" now Wrong

The latest wisdom from Britain:

"Attention Fred Flintstone and the Geico cave guys: "Stone Age" is no longer acceptable, joining the list of other words and terms deemed offensive in polite society. "Primitive" also is considered, well, primitive by some.

"All anthropologists would agree that the negative use of the terms 'primitive' and 'Stone Age' to describe tribal peoples has serious implications for their welfare," the British-based Association of Social Anthropologists said Tuesday. "Governments and other social groups have long used these ideas as a pretext of depriving such peoples of land and their resources."

The edict is the result of a kerfuffle that began last March when Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat member of Parliament, described two Botswana tribes as "trying to stay in the Stone Age" and "primitive" during a spirited debate. Though she later said she was misunderstood, Mrs. Tonge was criticized in the British press as "primitive" herself.

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‘Apocalypse my arse’

Martin Durkin, director of The Great Global Warming Swindle, on green intolerance, soft censorship and his ‘dodgy’ Marxist background. See the video version of the film here. The article below is from one of the retired Marxists at "Spiked"

‘I wanted to call it “Apocalypse My Arse”, but in the end we decided on “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. It’s a provocative title, which helps with ratings.’

Martin Durkin has a hangover. And a cold. He spent last night, Thursday 8 March, watching the Channel 4 screening of his film The Great Global Warming Swindle in a pub with friends and colleagues. ‘It’s better than watching it at home. That can be an isolating experience. You become convinced you’re the only person in the country watching it.’ Now, this morning, he has some things to get off his chest – about the green movement’s demonisation of him for daring to question environmentalist orthodoxy; the ‘soft censorship’ of his earlier programmes; and the endless revelations that he had an apparently dodgy Marxist background. ‘Shock, horror’, he says. ‘Exposing that a journalist has a Marxist background is like exposing that he wears trousers.’

Durkin’s latest film has won him the accolade – or perhaps slur – of being the ‘anti-Al Gore’. Where the American president-who-never-was transformed his rather dull PowerPoint presentation on the threat of global warming into a marginally less dull big box office flick – An Inconvenient Truth – Durkin has directed a 90-minute made-for-TV movie that basically says: ‘Everything you know about global warming is wrong!’

Its title a knowing, punk-rebellious nod to the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, The Great Global Warming Swindle featured scientists questioning whether global warming is manmade. Some of them argued that the Sun - directly, or through its effect on cosmic rays - causes global warming. Others claimed that CO2 levels are influenced by changes in temperature rather than the other way around. If this were the case, it would turn on its head every fundamental assumption underpinning not just the green movement but also national and international politics, a whole new genre of global warming literature and research, and much of the newly greened education system in Britain: those assumptions being that a rise in CO2 is causing the Earth to warm, that man is responsible for that rise in CO2, and thus we must rein man in. No wonder many seem miffed by Durkin’s film.

Whatever viewers may have thought about the new theories put forward in Swindle to explain global warming (personally, I found the replacement of the widespread, all-encompassing manmade theory with an all-encompassing cosmic ray theory – sort of ‘It’s the Sun wot done it!’ – a little unconvincing), there’s no denying that the film poked some very big holes in the global warming consensus.

Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, one of the world’s leading experts on malaria, was a revelation. He explained how he had to threaten legal action against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to have his name removed from the list of ‘2,000 of the world’s leading scientists’ who apparently backed its summary published last month. The problem? Professor Reiter didn’t back it, instead arguing that it was a ‘sham’. The IPCC ‘make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed, but it’s not true’, he said.

And leaving to one side the science of global warming, there was also some stirring stuff on the impact of the environmentalist ethos on political debate and human ambition – especially in relation to the developing world. Many of the talking heads argued that our obsession with restraining development in order to ‘save the planet’ will consign the world’s poorest to a life of grime and squalor. And, ironically, pollution. As one contributor pointed out, the smoke from cowshit and other items that some in the developing world burn in order to warm their homes – because they don’t have electricity and because the only solution put forward for their predicament is that they should use expensive and ineffectual ‘sustainable’ solar and wind power – is recognised by the World Health Organisation as one of the worst pollutants in the world. Tens of thousands of children in the developing world die every year from respiratory problems brought on by such in-house smog. It is peasantry, rather than modernity, that kills them; shit, not cars.

Watching The Great Global Warming Swindle felt a little bit naughty, even subversive. You simply never hear stark criticisms of the politics of global warming in the mainstream media very much. And yet, as Durkin points out, the response to his film has pretty much been a shrill: How can Channel 4 show this stuff?!

‘Some people seem really outraged that 90 minutes of airtime was given to “the other side”’, he says. He describes as ‘surreal’ the accusation that Channel 4, in airing his film, is somehow distorting the debate about global warming. One commentator declared: ‘Channel 4 has done a huge public disservice. Or are they planning to show a follow-up that takes apart last night’s wayward thesis?’ (1) ‘These people talk about balance, but the environmentalist view is everywhere!’, says Durkin. Indeed, even Durkin’s film was not allowed to stand alone: earlier in the week Channel 4 showed a Dispatches documentary made by green Guardian columnist George Monbiot to ‘balance out’ Durkin’s film, and then repeated it again last night after Durkin’s film. So even when you get to criticise the prevailing view, you have to be sandwiched in between two slabs of Monbiot.

TV has been well and truly greened: there are hectoring lifestyle shows like No Waste Like Home and It’s Not Easy Being Green, the greening of various soap characters, the unwritten law that says all wildlife documentaries must pass comment on how man has endangered tigers/whales/polar bears (usually polar bears), and news programmes frequently leading on The Threat of Global Warming to Life As We Know It, complete with Peter Snow-style swingometer graphics showing creeping deserts, disappearing glaciers and, of course, stranded bloody polar bears.

And yet some have branded Channel 4 as irresponsible for showing a 90-minute critical film which Durkin says he struggled for 10 years to have commissioned. ‘It shows that environmentalists and journalists can be utterly intolerant’, he says. ‘They simply will not tolerate any dissenting view. Straight away they try to take it down. You can see that in the kind of language they use – they say “the jury is in” on global warming, or “the science is done and dusted”, or you’re a “denier” if you question the consensus. This is not about having a debate but about shutting down debate.’

Indeed, many of Durkin’s critics have responded to The Great Global Warming Swindle by trying to slur Durkin and the participants in the film. Or they have gone running to the Office of Communications (Ofcom) to demand that it rap Durkin’s knuckles – a bit like overgrown school sissies squealing to teacher about the boy they don’t like in the hope that teacher will give him a jolly good thrashing.

Before the film aired, a contributor to a green-leaning website advised fellow contributors to keep an eye out for who is due to appear in the film ‘and more importantly who they work for’ (my italics). This sums up the approach of trying to demolish the arguer rather than his argument, to expose people’s alleged funding or leanings rather than to take up the substance of what they say. (For what it’s worth, most of the participants in the film said they hadn’t received a penny from oil companies, much as they would have liked to.)

In today’s Guardian, Zoe Williams seems to make a sly dig at one of the participants (Professor Tim Ball) on the basis that he is from Winnipeg. Apparently, being based on Farringdon Road in central London is a far better qualification for commenting on climate change, even if you are a ditzy la-la columnist and the weird Winnipeg man a professor of climatology (2). (Durkin points out the irony of people ‘exposing’ that he doesn’t have a background in science. If everyone who doesn’t have a background in science was forbidden from researching or talking about global warming, he says, then that would mean silencing some of the leading environmentalist thinkers and just about every newspaper columnist, who can always be relied upon to churn out an ‘I’m Scared of Global Warming and So Should You Be!’ column despite not knowing what a test tube is.)

On Wednesday, before the film even aired, a left-leaning website provided readers with a link to Ofcom’s website and the instruction: ‘Please do complain [about The Great Global Warming Swindle], and please do publicise this link and ask others to complain.’ It gave a link to the Channel 4 complaints website, too, saying that if Channel 4 ‘get a number of complaints then they will find it harder to commission future programmes from Durkin’ (3). This represents a new low in the discussion of environmentalism. Instead of having an upfront, open debate about the science, and the social and political courses of action that might be required to alleviate pollution while still meeting people’s needs and desires, some try to have a film written off by the suited and booted powers-that-be at Ofcom and a director excommunicated from the world of TV.

Durkin has been here before. His 1997 series, Against Nature, also an impassioned critique of environmentalism, was similarly the subject of a concerted complaints effort. This led to the Independent Television Commission (subsequently superseded by Ofcom) chastising Durkin and Channel 4 for using ‘underhand editing techniques’.

‘It is soft censorship’, Durkin insists. ‘If there is a huge response to a programme, then the ITC and now Ofcom feel the need to do something. So they end up censuring seriously controversial work. I mean, Channel 4 shows a lot of rubbish, like “wank week”. But because hardly anyone complains about that, Ofcom doesn’t say anything. And then people complain about my work, which is serious, and these bodies take action. It might not be formal censorship, but it is a kind of invisible censorship. The end result is phoney controversialism on TV but not much real controversialism. Ofcom is supposed to uphold standards but it does the opposite.’

He believes that such official chastisement – which was widely celebrated by some greens in relation to Against Nature and which is being demanded again for The Great Global Warming Swindle – has a ‘chilling effect’ on TV output. The big broadcasters, desperate to avoid being ticked off by Ofcom, will avoid showing anything liable to invite large numbers of complaints. So they stick with the wankers of ‘wank week’ instead. A far safer bet.

Durkin’s experiences with Against Nature also showed that the cheap and conspiratorial shot of denouncing someone by associating them with others can be used to stifle genuine debate. Who was he sinisterly associated with over the Against Nature controversy? Why, LM, the predecessor magazine to spiked which was edited by Mick Hume.

Scour the web for commentary on Against Nature (only if you have absolutely nothing else to do – seriously) and you will find shrill, green-ink enviro-babble about how we sinister Marxists at LM pulled the puppet-strings of Against Nature in order to do big business’s bidding against the poor, beleaguered environmentalist movement. Or something. In fact, a few people who contributed articles to LM appeared as talking heads on Against Nature. That’s all. Not as exciting as the crazed and wide-eyed web conspiracy theories make it sound, I know. Sorry.

Yet that hasn’t stopped the anti-LM conspiracy-mongering from making a comeback to coincide with the airing of The Great Global Warming Swindle - 10 years after Against Nature was first shown and seven years since LM was forced to close following a libel action brought by ITN. The new Channel 4 film has been described as ‘The Great LM Swindle’. Anti-globalisation author Paul Kingsnorth has written a satirical skit about what might have happened at the Channel 4 offices when they decided to commission Durkin’s latest film. It ends with one of the C4 bosses saying: ‘Brilliant work everyone. Lunch at the Groucho to celebrate? spiked is paying.’ (4) As well as being spectacularly unfunny (miserabilists can’t do satire), the skit is, of course, pure fantasy: spiked had no involvement in The Great Global Warming Swindle and we never buy anyone lunch. Our petty cash is so petty it doesn’t stretch to that.

Durkin laughs about the fact that many environmentalists fancy themselves as leftists, yet ‘they are always exposing me…as a leftist!’ It is indeed surreal – pure madness, in fact – for environmentalist writers, activists, politicians, TV-makers and the rest to complain about the showing of Durkin’s film, when their arguments are so widespread and so rarely challenged. Talking to Durkin, it is clear he is nobody’s stooge – not Big Oil’s, not Big Science’s, and certainly not mine or spiked’s. Whether he’s exposing the origins of environmentalism, the scare about GM food or the global warming consensus, he makes film about things that he believes in; it’s just that his beliefs don’t chime with what we’re ‘supposed’ to believe today. In these uncritical, unquestioning times, we could do with more anti-conformist films from ‘mavericks’ like Durkin.

The various attempts to have him shut up, denounced, sacked or whatever speak to a worryingly censorious climate in the climate change debate. And whatever the sceptics in the Swindle film might think, such a climate has not come about as a result of a handful of greens conspiratorially plotting to take down Durkin and anyone else who stands in their way. Rather, it is a product of a broader, society-wide attitude of ‘You can’t say that!’ in relation to discussions of global warming, development, man’s intervention in nature and the future of humanity itself. If we want a proper debate about these issues, we need an open and rigorous public life, rather than sneaky accusations of secret conspiracies and demands for censure.

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STERN ACCUSED OF OVERCOOKING THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The British mandarin behind a gloomy report on climate change has had to run a gauntlet of American economists

PUNCH "Sir Nicholas Stern" into Factiva, the news clippings database, and you'll find only 38 references to him in the American press over the past 12 months. In Britain the quality papers alone have mentioned him more than 501 times (make that 502).

Commissioned by the government to look at the impact of climate change, Stern published his review last October and it makes sober reading. Unless drastic action is taken - and soon - 200m people are likely to be displaced by floods by 2050, Stern concluded. According to his 600-page report the global economy could shrink by between 5% and 20% over the next two centuries because of the likely disruption to people's way of life caused by global warming. Taking action now to reduce carbon emissions would involve a "significant but manageable" one-off cost of 1% of global economic output by 2050. Not taking action would be disastrous: "Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," wrote the former World Bank chief economist.

Until recently America's ruling party was in a state of denial about global warming. President George W. Bush appeared to believe it was a hoax. His critics accused the former Texan oilman of letting the world burn to protect business interests.

Mid-term elections have given the Democrats the upper hand in Washington and global warming has become a hot topic, fuelled by former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and his Oscar-nominated documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Stern was in Washington this month to address Congress about his report - an audience, it would be fair to assume, more receptive to his words than at any other point in the Bush administration. Stern pressed Congress to consider adopting new regulations, funding new technologies and establishing a system of trading carbon-dioxide-emission credits to try to limit gases that spur global warming. "Leadership in the world's largest markets sets the pace elsewhere," he told the Senate's energy and natural resources committee. "Now is the time to act urgently, strongly and internationally."

But while the politicians were at least paying lip service, America's academics were taking their gloves off. On a trip to Yale, Stern was compared to the Wizard of Oz, his frightening picture a projection of badly flawed economics. Unlike Bush, it is not that Yale's economists doubt that the earth is getting hotter, or that human activity is the cause of global warming. The clear implication is that Stern overstated his case for political reasons.

Stern's biggest critic is William Nordhaus, an expert on the economics of global warming at Yale. In a public debate Nordhaus said the report "commits cruel and unusual punishment on the English language", adding that the British government's opinion on climate change was no more infallible than its prewar view about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Fellow Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn was blunter still. He was "awestruck" by the report, comparing Stern to "The Wizard of Oz". "My job is to be Toto [Dorothy's terrier, which unmasks the wizard]," he added.

Commenting on the dispute, Paul Joskow, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, said: "I don't think that there is a disagreement in terms of policy. The US needs to get on board and control greenhouse gases." Even Nordhaus has called Stern "fundamentally correct in sign if not in size". "The problems have been with the way in which the analysis in the report has been packaged," said Joskow. Academics felt the damage attributed to climate change was "chosen from the high side of the probability distribution" and likely costs "from the low side", Joskow said.

More criticism will soon be forthcoming. Harvard economics professor Martin Weitzman, in a soon-to-be published report in the Journal of Economic Literature, has made another attack on Stern's methodology. He argues that the UK government official overcooked his figures. The Stern report is biased toward gloom, argues Weitzman. According to "a generous interpretation of its not-so-great economic analysis," the report "has its heart in the right place" but its numbers do not back up its "alarmist tone", he writes.

The main economic objection to Stern centres on "the discount rate". Stern's headline numbers assumed that a dollar of economic damage prevented a century from now (adjusted for inflation) is roughly as valuable as a dollar spent reducing emissions today. The figure makes the cost of disaster to our grandchildren equal to the cost of the same disaster to ourselves.

Morally, the approach is unimpeachable; economically, its critics argue it is a nonsense. The world's economy is set to grow at 4.1% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Already today's dollar is looking like it is worth less than it will be worth tomorrow. If growth rates continue at present levels, then in 100 years' time there will be no comparison between the two figures. A richer and more technologically advanced society will be better able to deal with tomorrow's problems than we are today, argue Stern's critics.

The Stern Review team has begun to address these criticisms and published a defence of its methodology. The easiest part of the argument to follow is that "business-as-usual emissions of GHGs (greenhouse gases) could radically reduce the standard of living of future generations".

But his critics say it is still Stern's convictions, not his numbers, that buttress his argument. "I think very highly of Nick," said Joskow. "There's always a question if you are an economist: should you be stepping over the line and become a politician and a promoter? Nick has come to believe that this is a very serious problem, and drastic measures need to be taken. The very large numbers in the Stern review are at best speculative."

The report has certainly ignited a heated academic debate. But so far Stern's words do not appear to have reached a mass audience in America in the same way they have in Europe.

"These kinds of problem get you all tied up with the dilemmas of the infinite. We don't know a lot of things and 100 years away is a very long time," said Joskow. "Getting away from the precise numbers, the fact that it has helped to invigorate a debate about climate change and how we deal with it is very good. Maybe that was the intent: to shock people and get them to think."

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British schoolboys arrested over `racist taunts'

A typical British police over-reaction. All that happened was a bit of juvenile cheekiness -- a repetition by some kid or kids of a sporting expression that drew attention to the teacher's Jewishness. At a time when calls to the British police for assistance are routinely ignored, one could only hope that they would react with the vigour shown below to complaints of burglary, assault etc. Under Ingsoc (Orwell's abbreviation of "English Socialism"), thoughtcrime is more important than real crime. I have zero tolerance for antisemitism but this was just kids being kids.

Eight teenage boys were arrested in class after a film shown on the internet was alleged to show them shouting racist taunts at a teaching assistant, David Appleman, during his leaving party. Police took the 14 and 15-year-olds out of Chauncy School at Ware, Hertfordshire, drove them off in vans and questioned them for nine hours at Bishop's Stortford police station. They were fingerprinted, photographed and had DNA swabs taken. A spokeswoman said that reports of a racist incident were being investigated.

The film was made in December and posted on the YouTube video-sharing website. Police are believed to have removed it for examination. The youths were released on police bail. A Hertfordshire Police spokesman said: " "We take allegations of this nature very seriously and we believe we acted accordingly."

Dennis O'Sullivan, Chauncy School's head teacher, said: "When these boys realised that Mr Appleman was leaving they prepared a tribute to Mr Appleman for his last lesson. "David is seen on video looking delighted, smiling and shaking hands with each of the boys." It is thought that the alleged racist comments followed afterwards.

Mr O'Sullivan said he believed that Mr Appleman had complained to police, adding: "It is sad to see he made a complaint against our students without telling us." He continued: "None of us should accept racism in any part of our lives." Police said that investigations into the matter were ongoing.

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We read elsewhere:

They were accused by Chauncy's former technology assistant, David Appleman, of making anti-Semitic remarks during his leaving party in December. It is alleged that 'Yid Army' was shouted - a nickname for Tottenham Hotspur's Jewish supporters that is often heard at football grounds.






NHS DENTISTRY BUNGLE

NHS dentistry faces a 120 million pound shortfall because the Health Department wrongly estimated how many patients would contribute to the cost of their treatment, the Tories claimed yesterday. Many people appear to have abandoned the NHS to go private, reducing the amount of money that NHS dentists are able to collect through patient charges.

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, used the Freedom of Information Act to seek data for 51 of England's 152 primary care trusts, which pay dentists. He said that nearly all were collecting less patient revenue than they had expected. The deficit for the 51 trusts was more than 41 million pounds, which suggested, Mr Lansley said, that the deficit for all 152 trusts would 120 million.

The figures also suggested that since 2005-06 there had been a 6 per cent drop in the level of dental care on the NHS, equivalent to 1.4 million fewer people registered with an NHS dentist, he said. "This is the latest revelation in a long series of NHS mismanagements under Labour. Eight years ago, Tony Blair promised everyone would have access to an NHS dentist but in the last year alone, 1.4 million fewer people have access. Labour wanted to milk dental patients through higher charges but the decline in NHS dentistry has even thwarted that plan."

The Health Department contested Mr Lansley's claims. "This survey paints a picture of NHS dentistry that we do not recognise. We do not accept the claim that 1.4 million fewer people now have access to NHS dentistry," it said. "Equally it is nonsense to talk of a massive shortfall in investment.

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