Birth control: a cold day in hell

There’s an old Chinese proverb, it may be Confucius, it may be Chairman Mao; for all I know or care it might be Ken Lo or Bert Kwok, but it goes: ‘It is always difficult to make predictions – especially about the future.’ And whoever said it, he was right.

Predictions are what Mystic Meg (told by the editor of The Sunday People that if she was any good she would have known in advance that he was going to fire her), or any of the hundreds of charlatans calling themselves Gipsy Rose Lee do for a living. If they are called Chief Monolulu, and they tell you ‘I gotta horse’– as I remember to my cost as a youth – they are best avoided.

Prediction is not science. Scientists cannot do the future. They have more than enough on their plate trying to reach any form of conclusions about the past, and that is there for them to see. They don’t know what has already happened, so how can they expect to be taken seriously when they tell us what is going to happen next?

There’s an email that circles the Internet with infuriating frequency about predictions that were just plain wrong. I won’t bore you with all of it, just with a couple from people who should have been in a position to know what they were talking about:
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

Science, as you may remember if you did physics at school, means knowledge; prediction means guesswork.

In Washington DC this spring (where the cherry blossom was waiting for it to stop snowing, so it could bloom) I learnt from a jubilant Greenpeace-US representative that the organisation had been successful in having the polar bear classed as a ‘threatened’ species under the federal Endangered Species Act, ‘due to the meltdown of its sea-ice habitat caused by global warming.’

When I ventured that there appeared to be no evidence that the number of polar bears was decreasing, nor that their continued existence was under any threat, the Greenpeacenik replied (and readers who are being scared out of their wits by the doomsayers might like to consider this): ‘Maybe not. We don’t actually know. But the classification is a temporary measure, while we try to find out the facts.’

Well, that’s one way of approaching science - declare a situation as true and scary, and then set about checking it for accuracy.

The scientific evidence to support this claim appears to be one photogenic polar bear on one tiny ice-flow. Other pictures show wiser bears moving off small pieces of ice onto a more solid footing. That, presumably, is how the species continues to survive.

The Greenpeace argument also claims to be supported by ‘NASA findings that the polar bear is at risk.’

Now, Greenpeace is an environmental lobby group with a message to sell, even if it hasn’t yet got round to standing up its own propaganda. Exactly why the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (the engineers and scientists who send people to the moon, vehicles to Mars, and run the space shuttle) should be interested in earth’s polar bears is a different matter for concern.

But Greenpeace says that NASA has announced ‘measurements showing [that] Arctic sea ice is hitting major lows. This is more bad news on the impacts of global warming effects and bad news for the polar bear.’

Only the first of those two statements was actually from NASA. And where did the spacemen get their data about Arctic ice?

Oh... from Greenpeace-US.

American travel agents that specialise in Arctic ventures were meanwhile advertising excursions on the basis that it is nowadays easier than ever to guarantee polar bear sightings – ‘possibly’ (being no more scientific than that) because of an increased population.
My own scientific conclusion is that perhaps we should be more concerned about the finders, than about the findings.

A slightly warmer than normal British January was held up by the scientists as proof that the year was starting with signs of global warming. The same experts were strangely silent the following month when five international airports were closed in the UK because of snow, and a million schoolchildren were kept out of classrooms on account of the weather. They disappeared from sight altogether in March when northern Europe was in the grip of ‘Arctic’ weather. According to the UK Highways Agency mid-March was ‘the latest in the year we’ve ever had to prepare for snow storms.’

When I wrote in a newspaper that the evidence for global warming appeared, to me, relatively unconvincing, I was denounced as a Flat-Earther. (That was nothing; Mark Steyn, plying his column on the other side of the Atlantic and saying much the same thing, was denounced as a Holocaust-Denier – such is the level of debate and tolerance among the warm-mongers.)

My point of view was dismissed as a ‘silly five cents worth’.

‘Did he [meaning me] not see the images [plural] of drowning [sic] polar bears [plural] on floating ice sheets [again: plural]?’

What I, like the rest of us, have seen so far this year is the sort of seasonal fluctuation that I have been seeing all my life, and that historians and diarists have observed down the centuries.

A friend who was in the Royal Navy during the war sent his family a moving letter about seeing a polar bear on a tiny iceberg that was inexorably drifting south - yet the 1940s was the coldest decade for 100 years.

Although there’s an enormous chunk of the population that relishes any bad news, and wants something to be done (usually by other people) about it, the facts are simply not on their side.

At the South Pole the main land mass (the Antarctic) is actually getting colder; at the North Pole the western Arctic is getting warmer but the eastern Arctic’s getting colder. If the polar bears are worried about survival, they’ll need to move around a bit, something that’s not normally beyond the wit of even the dumbest animals.

Just over a thousand years ago, when Erik the Red and his Viking pals headed off to explore, they found a place and called it Greenland. You might wonder how they came up with such a colourful name, although the fact that they settled there to hunt and to farm might be a bit of a clue.

The Little Ice Age occurred, covering the place with frozen water, about 500 years later - and while I’ve no idea what impact those early settlers had on the local environment, it seems harsh to blame them for causing the Thames to freeze over. And it may be worth wondering whether green isn’t the colour that nature always intended that part of the earth to be painted.

Thirty years ago we were threatened with another Ice Age if we didn’t change our ways; we should actually be freezing our socks off by now. The scientists who predicted that scare are now nowhere to be seen, or heard.

The generation that followed them is projecting sufficient hot air about a totally opposite effect to put the wind up sensitive people.

Anybody can be a weather expert. It’s like predicting the results of elections: there are usually only two options so you have a 50-50 chance of being right on the money.

There’s also another faction of fence-sitting experts who are simply predicting ‘climate change’ without daring to be specific - in other words, they aren’t sure which way it’s going but, whatever, it’s changing. Yes: the global climate does quite a lot of that.

Some people think they can see a pattern of extreme changes roughly every 30 years; others think it’s more like every five centuries. In some places it’s much more frequent than either of those periods: in Melbourne they sometimes experience four seasons in one day; in parts of America they say that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes...

The hairshirts, however, are never content unless they can find something to be miserable about. They read only the scary headlines (which are, after all, the bread and butter of journalism) but ignore their science.

Here’s some of mine: from beginning to end of the 20th century the temperature increased - at most - by something less than 0.75 of one degree (Celsius). In other words, by a measurement that is undetectable on the majority of thermometers.

Where does birth control come into this silly argument?

Right here.

Scientists (if you are still reading you will know by now that I use that term fairly recklessly to describe people who think what they do is scientific) are now suggesting that one solution is for the civilised world to produce fewer children.

The human race, you see, is responsible for whatever changes the climate is going through; so it follows that smaller populations would mean less impact on Mother Nature.

The birth rate in the UK is a fraction less than two children per couple; in Europe as a whole is it marginally more than one.

Now: you don’t have to call yourself a scientist to work out that if two people – what we used to call a married couple – produce only one child, and that child marries, or even doesn’t, but has a partner and between them they produce only one child, and so on, in time the human race will be extinct.

And that isn’t prediction; that is mathematics.

But wait.

There is no call for a lower birth rate in the third world, where the typical parental production line might be churning out eight and sometimes more babies per couple. Well no: that would be racist. So the starving millions would be increasing while the civilised and industrialised nations that basically fund the rest of the planet will eventually be wiped out. Long before even the polar bear.

Yeah. That sounds like a solution.

Just watch out for the men in white coats.

Or the men in white mitres.

For the Bishop of Carlisle, talking out of the top of his pointy hat as some of his rank are prone to do, has explained climate change to his congregation, and to anybody else daft enough to listen, by blaming it on you sinners.

[It should perhaps be pointed out that, while the UK has been suffering from floods, tornados and cold, cold weather, Malta has been baking. When did you last see the word ‘searing’ in a weather report?]

The Right Rev explains his lousy local weather as ‘a strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant . . . we are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation’.
He even puts some of the blame on the gay liberation movement: ‘The sexual orientation regulations are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment.’

So now we know. Bloody hot (me) is caused by an over-use of fossil fuels and the exhaust emissions from buses and lorries; bloody freezing (you) is caused by ignoring the Old Testament. Forgive us our trespasses, for we are soaked to the skin and freezing verily unto death.

Malta can rest easy because, on this bishop's say-so, the sun shines only on the righteous. And that - as is plain to see - is us, folks.

Unless (and it is, I know, verging on the blasphemous to suggest it) God has more than one approach to sinners. And we in in the middle of the Med are simply being slowly fried, as a rehearsal for hell.

Having brought God into the argument (it wasn’t me, guv, but some other Rev) can we hazard a guess about what He thinks about the global warming warnings?

Here’s a clue that might be significant: attendance at the Johannesburg element of the recent round-the-world pop misery-fest was much lower than expected… because it snowed there, for the first time in 25 years. Bloody hell.
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