David Craig, on August 18th, 2023Friday/weekend blog
A factcheck farce
In my last blog, I featured a chart from Bjørn Lomborg, author of several books including THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST, showing that despite decreasing areas of the planet being burnt by wildfires, the number of times wildfires were mentioned by the mainstream media was increasing. This rather suggests a media-fueled scare campaign which has nothing to do with the actual prevalence of wildfires:
I have just noticed that this chart has been supposedly ‘factchecked’ and found to be ‘misleading’:
Here’s part of the explanation given by the supposed ‘factcheckers’: ‘While true that the world as a whole is seeing fewer burned areas, this is not true for all regions. In places like the United States, the extent of wildfires is increasing. More and more forest is being lost, and as inhabited areas are expanding into the wild, risks of ignition and the harms connected with wildfires are increasing. Meanwhile, climate change is exerting upward pressure on fire globally by increasing the frequency and intensity of weather conditions fit for fires to happen. The posts on social media do not take any of this into account. Therefore, we have marked this claim as misleading’.
Do I need to explain the stupidity of this ‘factcheck’?
- Firstly the ‘factcheck’ admits ‘that the world as a whole is seeing fewer burned areas’
- The ‘factcheck’ then says ‘this is not true for all regions’. OK, but if some regions have more burnt area and the total burnt area is decreasing as the ‘factcheck’ admits, then some areas must be having significantly less burnt area
- The ‘factcheck’ claims ‘In places like the United States, the extent of wildfires is increasing’. This may be true of the last few years, but the area burnt in the U.S. is tiny compared to the area burnt in the boiling hot 1920s and 1930s when atmospheric CO2 levels were around 100 ppm (parts per million) lower than they are today:
- The ‘factcheck’ admits ‘as inhabited areas are expanding into the wild, risks of ignition and the harms connected with wildfires are increasing’. OK, this means that many of the wildfires are due to extended human habitation and nothing to do with supposed climate change
- The ‘factcheck’ ends by claiming ‘climate change is exerting upward pressure on fire globally by increasing the frequency and intensity of weather conditions fit for fires to happen. If that’s true, then why does the ‘factcheck’ admit ‘the world as a whole is seeing fewer burned areas’?
I admire the climate catastrophists’ increasingly complicated mental contortions as they try to turn everything into proof that we are facing climate Armageddon when the facts suggest that the opposite is true.
The West’s predicted civilisational decline
And while we’re on the subject of mass stupidity, here’s a simple model of civilisational rise and fall:
Sir John Glubb warned us
I’m now going to repeat the description of civilisational collapse I used in a blog last year.
In his analysis of past civilisations – FATE OF EMPIRES, military commander and historian Sir John Glubb described the final phase of each civilisation as follows:
“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”
Although this was written almost fifty years ago, I think you’ll agree that every single word of the above accurately describes the West today:
Point 1: “Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population
Absolutely correct. Of the above list, I’d like to highlight ‘narcissism’ as I suggest that the whole woke nonsense of climate-catastrophism and multiple genders and micro-aggressions, critical race theory and much else, which is tearing our countries apart, is just a form of fanatical, virtue-signalling, nihilistic narcissism.
Point 2: Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust.
Absolutely correct – just look at the bunch of lying, incompetent, scheming, self-enriching cowards running the UK. Or the senile basket-case of a US president. Or the rotten corrupt, self-serving EU. Or the totally corrupt international organisations like the United Nations or the World Health Organisation.
Point 3: A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots.
During Covid, the world’s billionaires have become massively richer while the rest of us have been burdened with huge rises in national debts the repayment of which we and our children and their children will be taxed for generations to come. Moreover, the elites are forcing their ludicrous ‘net zero’ greeny agenda on the rest of us, impoverishing our lives while they enjoy the privilege of jetting around the world to lecture on us on why we should be happy giving up many of those very things which make life worth living
Point 4: The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities
You only need to look at the endless stream of z-list supposed celebs on cooking or dancing or reality TV shows and see how many millions follow the inane twitterings of their social media heroes.
Point 5: The majority shirk duties but insist on entitlements.
With one in five Brits claiming they are disabled, with hundreds of thousands of Third-Worlders flooding into European countries with the most generous welfare systems and over two million crossing into the US since cognitively-challenged Joe Biden was wheeled into the White House unaware of where he was, why he was there and what day of the week it was, I hardly need to comment on this. Though I’ll mention Milton Friedman who famously once said something like, “you cannot simultaneously have open borders and a welfare state” (1999). This is something our open-borders-loving rulers don’t seem to understand.
Well, hopefully that will cheer you all up this weekend. As for me, I’ll be watching the women’s world cup as I was surprised at how entertaining the Australia vs England clash was.
Category: 
The only way to end the human caused global warming debate is by showing that the science basis of it is utter drivel. It says everything about education today that this has got such a grip on mass beliefs. It is based on heat being trapped. Heat cannot be trapped by definition because it is thermal energy transferring from one location to another. People do not even understand the difference between heat and thermal energy. It would make sense to talk about thermal energy being trapped but that would not cause any warming. Thermal energy is effectively trapped in fossil fuels and a lump of coal sat on a coffee table does not heat a home. Batteries cannot create thermal energy until they are connected to a circuit. One thing missing from the list of reasons for civilisational collapse is the belief in drivel, or perhaps it is better put as tenuous connection to reality and the biggest one of those is the belief of some kind of god and that has always been with us. Insane beliefs seem to be a characteristic of the human race.
Is there a difference between the decline of civilization and the decline of empires? Empires are created by force and can hardly be described as democratic. The one thing not mentioned in the list is the continual wars and violence. The question we might ask is whether the USA has effectively created an “empire” with its economic dominance and military presence around the world. I am not aware of many people who want wars and they would always say they want a peaceful existence. Empires have been created by war and violence so perhaps it is better if they do collapse. Wars also make a lot of money. Also, look how Europeans treated the American Indians, the Māori and Aboriginal people. I am sure that the Kennedy brothers, Dr King and Malcolm X were assassinated by the US deep state for their policies of peace.
What can the electorate do about any of these issues, assuming that they want to? Giving entitlements wins votes which we have seen in Britain particularly since Blair. No party will be elected in the UK if it takes away entitlements. But even those working have a sense of entitlement to high salaries compared to other workers around the world and so trade with us is expensive. This is why the UK living standards will collapse, but also we no longer have the raw materials to support a high standard of living. We cannot even provide the food we need which was also a problem for Rome.
How very prescient was Sir John Glubb, writing in what I assume were the mid-1970s. Those of us who were just about old enough to have already married and become parents when the hedonistic “Swinging Sixties” and “Flower Power” got underway and were concurrently experiencing the consequences of the incompetence of successive Governments, suspected in our more pessimistic moments that perhaps the Nation and culture for which our parents had fought and died two decades previously could be under threat. Never, though, could most of us have envisioned the civilisational decay now confronting us every day, decay which appears now to be irreversible. The simple fact is that while the West wallows in its alphabet soup, denying the biological facts of X & Y chromosomes, prioritises prosecution of mis-gendering someone on “soshul meeja” over knife crime, and indulges its hedonism, consumerism and worship of the gods of “celeb”, population replacement on an unprecedented scale is being facilitated by so-called “democratically elected” governments in the UK, the EU and the USA. I see the future for my grandchildren and their children and grieve for what it could have been.