Monbiot versus Plimer: Round 1

Just as the Aussie cricketers have rallied to deliver a damn good thrashing to floundering England, Ian Plimer has responded to George Monbiot's questions.

It is a response though that is harder to read than one of Warne's googlies. Plimer has sent Monbiot a list of questions that if nothing else make the mind boggle. They consist of a series of increasingly bizarre and probably nonsensical requests for Monbiot to make a series of calcualations "from first principles" and including all data used.

The Internet is currently buzzing (well humming slightly) with baffled warmists trying to figure out what Plimer's grand strategy is. One theory is that he is using the famous Chewbacca defence as featured in a certain South Park episode.

Perhaps it's an act of desperation, perhaps he's playing to his fans who are convinced he has a brain the size of a planet, perhaps he's taking the piss. Who knows?

Monbiot's repost is "you're asking the wrong person" which is a bit lame though. Surely the answer is 42?

Stuff Wot I Like: Jefferson Airplane

I have be a bit careful what I say sometimes as the eco-warriors I've hung around with over the years have tended to be a fairly punkish lot. At Wild Garlic if you were caught playing a penny whistle you were likely to see it nailed to a tree, and if you hummed a Bob Dylan song the same was likely to happen to you. However my tastes have always been much more hippyish and largely formed by the decade before I was born.

Actually the 'sixties' really began in about 1966 and ended in about 1974, so I was born slap bang in the middle, and the band that can most surely claim to be the most hippyish of them all was at its peak during this time.

Okay so The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, the Doors and The Who may have been better musically, but they just didn't walk the walk the same way as Jefferson Airplane. Songs about sex, drugs and flying saucers, a hot hippy chick on lead vocals who was sleeping with most of the band, an acrimonious split up and reincarnation, Spinal Tap style, as a second rate heavy metal band all make Jefferson Airplane the flower power band to measure all flower power bands by.

They played Woodstock, although their performance being delayed to the next morning sort of took the edge of things: great moments in psychedelia don't happen at eight in the morning. They courted controversy when a comment about a mud encrusted audience being "dirty jewels" was misheard as something anti-Semitic (as opposed to just pretentious). They were seen as being far more radical than they were: "Volunteers" sounds like it's calling on the fans to join the Viet Cong but was really inspired by a refuse collection lorry. And yet they still produced great music.


Perhaps only Crosby, Stills and Nash stand comparison in the league of all time hippy bands. Indeed, if you want to rouse a couple of old hippies to a heated debate (a very laid back heated debate admittedly) you could ask who's version of "Wooden Ships" is the best (the song was joint written so both are considered the original). Listen to the Airplane version in a chilled out mood and you can almost smell the weed. Listen to it in the wrong mood and you're bored before the end of the second verse.

So as fragile as a sand mandala, as coherent as an acid trip and as hippy as Donovan's paisley shirt, I present Jefferson Airplane.

The Fight of the Year: Monbiot v Plimer

Any antipodeans who are watching the Ashes in the hope of seeing the usual slaughter of the England lemmings must be a little disappointed, but if you want your fill of defenceless animals being led to the slaughter the speactalce is still on offer in the form of Monbiot versus Plimer; a debate coming to somewhere, sometime.

George Monbiot is a legend in his own lunchtime, a fellow veteran of the Direct Action protests of the 1990s. Our paths never actually crossed as whilst I was hiding in slimy northern tunnels he was proudly proclaiming in parts of the home counties that This Land Is Ours. He is now Britain's foremost environmental columnist by a considerable margin.

Plimer is Ian Plimer, a hitherto unknown Australian geologist who has written a book called Heaven and Earth - Global Warming: the Missing Science. He is a climate change denier and less charitable people than myself might suggest that 'the missing science' refers to the numerous errors in his thesis.

In his book Plimer claims arctic ice is expanding and that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than humans. On the way he also claims that we orbit the core of a supernova explosion - which would make the sun a neutron star or black hole, and that termite farts are more potent to greenhouse gases than the emissions of 6 billion fossil fuel consuming humans.

There's more, and more, and more.

Anyone following that link will find 38 pages of why Plimer is wrong.

However this hasn't stopped Plimer becoming the poster boy of climate change deniers and the cover story for our own Spectator magazine last month. Judging by what they've written about the book I would presume the Spectator is the traditional sort of publication thta only employs chaps from good schools who studied classics and doesn't let grubby scientists over their threshold.

Somewhere along the line Plimer got a bit cocky and challenged our George to a debate. Monbiot initially turned him down, not wanting to share a platform with a man who can pull imaginary statistics out of a hat, some of which can take up to a minute on Google to prove wrong. However Monbiot had second thoughts and agreed to the debate provide Plimer answered some written questions on some of the more startling claims in his book.

Plimer initially turned the challenge down but then, possibly because word of his refusal to answer questions had got as far as his Wikipedia entry, he accepted. Monbiot printed his 11 questions in the Guardian today.

I don't know if the debate will ever actually happen, but if it does it will probably be a lot less interesting than Plimer's response to these questions. Some, like the termite gaff, he could just claim are typos, but I don't know how he will get round the others.

Like most deniers our antipodean friend enjoys playing the outlaw martyr and in picking a fight with Monbiot this would be Ned Kelly may be about to make his last stand. Is his armour up to it?

Watch this space.

RIP: Robert MacNamara

Another sixties icon has passed on, although one that perhaps not many flower children will want to mourn.

Robert MacNamara was the architect of the 'bodycount' in Vietnam, the Defense Secretary who applied the scientific management of the motor company to the US military machine. The war, he thought, boiled down to a simple balance sheet of bombs dropped against communists killed. In his defence he appears to have admitted in later years that he was wrong (or rather he admitted that other people were wrong and he went along with them out of loyalty) but I guess if I was a Vietnamese villager whose family were napalmed I'd still be a little cross with him.

Another legacy of his is still very apparent in Iraq and Afghanistan today: the guided bomb. When they were first invented the Navy and the Air Force were sceptical. They could buy ten ordinary bombs for the cost of one of the new fangled bombs, and as the new bombs weren't ten times better they considered them a waste of money.

MacNamara's systems analysis disagreed. The cost of a bomb, he thought, should include the cost of the plane that carries it, the cost of the pilot that flies it and the cost of the airfield that the plane flies from. Hence the addition of a guidance system doesn't just make a $10,000 bomb twice as effective, it makes a $2 billion aircraft carrier twice as effective.

So as America continues to try to bomb its opponents into submission, secure in the belief that all it needs to triumph is more and better bombs, let us remember for a moment the man who led the way.

p.s. seeing as the guy has just died I will say one good thing about him: he desegregated the US army. Not an insignificant move given the climate of the times.

How Vietnam Was Lost

Thanks to BBC4 I have now been able to see the 2005 documentary How Vietnam Was Lost: Two days in October.

The idea that a war that lasted for more than ten years had a pivotal moment, other than the one when the US fled from Saigon, is a bit of an iffy one, but David Maranis, who wrote the book They Marched Into Sunlight, makes a pretty good case for suggesting that mid October 1967 was fairly important.

On 17th October Lieutenant Colonel Terry Allen Jnr let two companies of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry into action in Vietnam's Iron Triangle whilst on the other side of the world students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were preparing for a protest against Dow chemicals. In Vietnam the 'Black Lions' were ambushed and practically wiped out whilst in concrete jungle of Wisconsin the peaceful students were left clubbed and bleeding after being attacked by the police.

The mistakes that led to these tragic events were well covered. Colonel Allen, who'd just been received a 'Dear John' letter from his wife, was goaded by impatient senior officers into sending his men blind into an area of jungle know to contain Viet Cong. He died whilst staring at a picture of his three daughters. his command of 142 men suffered 58 dead, 75 wounded and two missing. In Wisconsin the head of the University called in the police and, heavily outnumbered by the protesters, the working class coppers decided to take out their frustrations on student heads.

The media response to both events was very similar. High command called the battle a decisive victory and the press duly reported that the Black Lions had in fact saved Saigon, whilst back in the Wisconsin the police were praised for their calmness in the face of a rioting students. Nothing changes it seems.

The film had a good selection of talking heads from students outraged at how the authorities were treating them to utterly unrepentant Madison police officers. The soldiers were interesting too, cynical about both their commanders and the public back home. They described the terror of the battle ("those in the sunlight die, those in the shade survived") and their rejection on their return home. One Sergeant wrote a letter home to himself as he knew nobody else would be there to welcome him. Finally we had the late Colonel's wife. An obviously intelligent women who having bagged a General's son was expected to stay at home and bake apple pie and not bother her head about the why and wherefores of the war. Shocked by what she saw on the TV she asked for a divorce, but became a widow instead.

How typical these two days were is an interesting question. It was claimed that the protests at the university were the first campus demonstrations to turn violent. Afterwards riots were commonplace at Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere.

As for the battle, it was probably typicalish of the combat at that time. The Americans bumped into a lot of large Viet Cong units and often got ambushed, part of General Giap's plan to knock America out of the war by inflicting unacceptable casualties on them. However US firepower usually turned the tables Giap and came close to inflicting unacceptable casualties on himself. Crucially he realised this and changed his tactics - which shows who was calling the shots in this war. Meanwhile the frequency of these large battles helped to sustain in the US high command the delusion that South Vietnam was facing an invasion and not an insurgency.

That was the reason they failed to win the military conflict. Like Generals in the First World War, Westmoreland and his staff believed that with just one more big push, a few more men and a few more bombs they could declare victory and quit. The destruction of the Black Lions didn't dent this belief, nor did the protest in Wisconsin. It would be another eight years before America started to address the reason for its failures in Vietnam.

Books not read: Futurecast 2020

Letter to Resurgence magazine

Many thanks for Tony Juniper's review of Robert Shapiro's Futurecast 2020 in Resurgence 254. Most Resurgence reviews make me want to rush out and buy the book, leading to a rather major reading backlog. However, as Mr Juniper makes clear, here is a book I need never bother with.

As a futurologist Mr Shapiro, who failed to spot the Credit Crunch even whilst it was happening, clearly leaves a lot to be desired, but he is an interesting case study in how clever people can be extremely daft. George Orwell was also very interested in this. He wondered why, whilst the ordinary person in the street never doubted that the allies would win the war, most intellectuals were betting on Hitler.

It's appropriate that this review appeared in an issue subtitled "Countering the Tyranny of Trends" because what Orwell saw was a form of power worship where people simply took the forces that appeared to be in ascendancy (Hitler's tanks in 1940, neoliberal economics in 2007) and imagined them carrying on for ever.

An example of futurology to rival Shapiro's appeared in the The Book of Predictions in 1980. A CIA expert on the Soviet Union confidently predicted that the USSR would win the Cold War and go on to dominate the world. By contrast this same volume contained an article by a Catholic priest who predicted that by 1990 Communism would be overthrown from within.

Sometimes the people who know what's going on are not those who claim to be experts, so I think I'll carry on taking my predictions for the future from Resurgence and not the likes of Mr Shapiro.

Sir Alan and the Anglo-Saxon disease

Last Friday I watched television, which is for me actually rather usual. The main reason was an excess of beer and curry and inertia, but the second reason was that The Apprentice was to feature contestants making New Agey scented soaps and things for their challenge. This being the sort of thing we buy a lot of in our house my wife wanted to watch. It wasn't a terribly romantic way to spend an evening - but I can probably blame the beer and curry for that.

I've never watched the program before, but I found it extremely enlightening. As far as I was able to understand the program the contestants were divided into two teams and had to make as much money as possible by flogging home made soap and other smellies to people in a hurry. Team A managed to make something that resembled a partially melted ice lolly, but managed to sell most of their stock for a few quid and came out with a slight profit. Team B made something that actually resembled soap but failed to sell enough and so lost. Team A were sent off to be wined and dined at a posh restaurent whilst selected members of Team B were hauled up in front of Sir Alan where upon they sold each other out like a prize group of stoolpigeons.

Coming at a time when the world's economy is crashing thanks to the mistakes of "blue eyed white men" this demonstration of the Anglo-Saxon business model was quite enlightening. For making some yuck in a packet Team A were rewarded with perks that cost considerably more than they took off the gullible commuters. Team B, despite actually managing to make what they were supposed to, and despite admitting to having had fun and been a happy team, were pilloried and, rather than sticking up for themselves, they tore into each other and their hapless leader.

So here we have the Anglo-Saxon way of doing business. We produce rubbish, we reward ourselves for making rubbish with money we don't have, and when it all goes tits up its everyone for themselves. Apparently in France black berrets are now proving popular, a way, apparently, of showing respect for Gallic traditions and to make absolutely clear that the wearer is not in any way, shape, or form Anglo-Saxon. Meanwhile Sir Alan, and the rest of our disgraced economic elite, still have their blackberries but no respect whatsoever.