Who let the dogmatists out?
April 8th, 2008 at 00:50

“The earth is spherical”

“What?! That’s clearly not true! There’s just a big scientific conspiracy by the liberal left to give the scientists jobs! Anyone who talks about the shape of earth should give a balanced view and give equal time to the flat earth society!”

I hate it when science is politicised. This might surprise you, as I love needlessly politicising everything else: films, TV shows, abstract concepts, politics, I’ll find a political angle on them all. But I think that the politicians should stay the fuck away from science.

Case in point: dangerously credulous Tory blogger Iain Dale keeps posting tenuous stories about how climate change totally isn’t happening. Y’know, despite all of the stacks of evidence and the overwhelming scientific consensus saying that it is.

What bothers me about it that its a purely dogmatic thing: Tory Iain presumably is under the impression that because he’s a Tory, he hates taxes, and therefore, if there’s green taxes to try and manipulate the market away from fossil fuels and carbon emissions, its a bad thing, because taxes are bad full stop, and therefore, any crackpot claiming that climate change isn’t occurring is proof that it’s a New Labour nanny-state socialist money-grabbing exercise to increase state control of the economy.

Its the same with the new laughing-stock of a film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about how how evolution by natural selection is a conspiracy orchestrated by “Big Science” and their Nazi agenda- the latter part of the title being a subtitle, not instructions to the cinema about who to turn away.

Obviously the thought process is even more clearly dogmatic here: “Our book says God created the Universe, therefore, despite stacks of evidence, evolution is totally untrue”.

I think it’s pretty clear that I disagree with them.

“But they just want a balanced view!”, defenders cry. That’s sounds fair, doesn’t it? Freedom of speech and all that? “If we don’t have freedom of speech then its Nazi Germany!”

Unfortunately for the global warming deniers and the creationists, science is not democratic, you cretins. Everyone could think something and it’d still be wrong, because science needs evidence. It’d be madness to suggest that (Godwin alert!) Holocaust Deniers should be allowed to give a “balanced view” of the Holocaust, because there’s stacks of evidence contrary to their ludicrous opinions.

And yeah, I know I’m not a scientist, but I do appreciate and understand the value of evidence – obviously if the scientific consensus on an issue were to shift, it’d be because some new evidence came to light. If the scientists launched a new satellite that scanned the earth’s interior and determined the earth had a honeycomb centre, and there was observations to back this up which falsified previous theories, then I’d be willing to believe the scientists.

So, please, politicians and dogmatists, please can you stay the fuck away from science, for the good of humanity?

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Trains are great!
August 30th, 2007 at 14:26

Apparently a single report has “proved” that cars are more environmentally friendly than trains. As you might spot on the link, the issue has been needlessly politicised by a bunch of anti-environmentalist cretins who have their heads in the sand, who seem to have no problem with ignoring an almost unanimous consensus that climate change is occurring.

I’m going to be generous and take the bullet pointed headlines of this at face value, and “accept” that cars have been proven to be more environmentally friendly than trains – even though the report only takes into account one hyperthetical journey, and seems to make assumptions about the occupancy of all of the vehicles involved, and the fuel consumptions of thousands of different types of cars.

Despite all of this, I would still argue that if we are serious about tackling global warming, then the last thing we should do is shut down the railways and give everyone cars. Why? Because its easier to make a couple of thousand trains more energy efficient than it is force everyone to buy a hybrid car.

Sure, using fossil fuels to power trains probably isn’t a good idea, but trains can be (more) easily upgraded to run off of electricity… electricity that can be generated entirely cleanly. A lot of railways are electrified – the London Underground, Eurostar (thus presumably the rest of the South East), and so on. Sure, this isn’t going to help if the source of the electricity is burning oil in a power station somewhere, but equally it could be generated by some wind turbines if they’d build some.

Car usage, being a “capitalist” mode of transport, as it is hilariously called on Guido’s blog, suffers from the so-called tragedy of the commons. In other words, why should I cut down on the amount of energy I consume?

Trains don’t have this problem, as its not possible to pick and choose your train. There’s no sports-utility-trains that go to the same places, that consume more fuel and make you feel important.

So I reckon it would be easier to upgrade the train network to more environmentally friendly trains, assuming such things exist or can be invented, than convince the general public to give a damn about the environment.

(Hypocrisy alert! I also drive a band C car… I’ll get a Prius whenever I finally start earning a lot of money. But I still like trains.)

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MEP in “twunt” shocker!
February 22nd, 2006 at 16:24

Christ on a bike! I feel like a proper investigative journalist! Almost a year ago East Midlands MEP Derek Clark came to my old school to rant at us about how awful the EU was- aside from admitting he was on the EU gravy train and enjoying it, when my friends and I questioned him at the end of the “general studies” session about energy, he reacted in a rather animated way.

We asked him if he agreed with fellow UKIPper Steve Reid who reckons that wind power isn’t renewable because it “takes energy out of the earth’s atmosphere” and could “slow the rotation of the earth”. Seriously. Dezza didn’t commit entirely to this idea- but did say there’s a lot of speculation and that no-one knows for sure. He claimed wind farms are ineffective when its not windy and so on, and that if we only used renewable energy, they’d be no form of redundancy. This was wrong, of course. He also suggested that we’d have to run fossil-fuel power plants anyway, for back up measures. I wonder why he said this?

Could this be because he owns shares in Powergen and British Gas? See: here (warning: PDF link). He also seems to be collecting a pension at the same time- he is old, though.

But, Derek Clark- yes, you, Derek Roland Clark, your lack of faith in renewable energy wouldn’t have anything to do with your financial interests, would it?

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