Monday, July 27, 2009

Jim Lovelock and Emma Duncan

I was at James Lovelock's 90th birthday party at the Orangery of Blenheim Palace yesterday. Blenheim - a work of double genius, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor - is in the English baroque style that inspired the purist revulsion which led to Holkham. It is a more purely English building in that nothing quite like this was ever built - could ever have been built - anywhere else. Also there are the supremely English grounds by a third genius, Capability Brown.
Jim, of course, is the most purely English man imaginable. At 90 he is fully vindicated. There are no serious challenges now to his Gaia Theory except from those who persist in believing it's some New Age nonsense about crystals. The earth is now routinely considered as a single complex system, though few give credit to the man who first worked out how and why, on the way inventing the electron capture detector and, apparently, the microwave oven. He never made money out of these things, it is not in his nature. He was further vindicated yesterday by the declassification of pictures suppressed by Bush showing the extent of ice melt in Alaska. Jim has said the speed of the ice melt proves current climate models are over-optimistic. He is one of the greatest men alive and, at 90, his genius is undimmed.
Judge, then, of my reaction on reading, when I got home, this article. It advocates active discrimination against gays, blacks and Muslims - sorry, sorry - against people over fifty. They are, it seems, inefficient or something. I won't bother taking it apart line by line. Why should I? Jim Lovelock is a friend of mine.

12 comments:

  1. nice place Blenheim. Of course, it'll all have to go under the spade when the inevitable happens.

    so, you're gay - reading ''women's pages''. that's all right by me, someone has to. all I know is it's only the under 50s who worry about being over 50. I mean, who cares?!

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  2. In the dead tree version the ageist piece of nonsense was just in 'News Review' - I don't think there is a "Women's" section though frankly there are so many sections in the ST that I might have missed it somewhere between "Hamsters and Guinea Pigs" and the 80-page pull-out special "Walks around Hull".

    The rest of the Timesonline website is, presumably, all for men.

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  3. Absolutely Max baby, down there in Tubingen, stick the old twerps outside the igloo at dusk, solves all of the problems, up comes your fiftieth, thro' the letterbox pops the piece of paper, on the ice you go, cost effective,see.
    Except me of course, Dave will need me shortly.

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  4. "The only thing you can say for sure about a broken-down old man is that he's a survivor." (Way of the Gun)

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  5. What does Lovelock think about the recent Medea hypothesis, that the Earth is actually hostile towards life.

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  6. So how long does Lovelock reckon we've got left?

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  7. Who is Emma Duncan. More to the point, why is Emma Duncan?

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  8. I once danced at Blenheim. It really was spectacular.

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  9. Emma Duncan and her piece turn out to be more interesting than expected. Google quickly tells me that her mentor was the ancient Anthony Sampson, author in 1970s of The Sovereign State of ITT, which blew the whistle on that JP Morgan-backed outfit's playing of both sides of the Second World War, through its ownership of Focke Wolfe among other things. One of the few authors cited with approval by groundbreaking English-American scholar Antony Sutton as he delved more broadly into the murky area of Wall Street's entanglements with Hitler and the Nazis in 1976, I remember well. And Duncan's current ageism is largely based on research from the Max Planck Institute, once called the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, in the good old days when it laid the intellectual groundwork for the Holocaust. On which, Edwin Black's War against the Weak should give anyone pause for thought on sheepish adherence to 'scientific consensus' helped along by big money in any age.

    Rather than salute Lovelock I have a serious question for him about current debate of so-called mitigation of global warming. Would he accept Ross McKitrick's ingenious Truth-based Cap-and Trade, at least in principle, as presented last year to the US Congress? (See the helpful video, with PowerPoint, also viewable here.) There's an important technical issue at stake: the signature of CO2-produced warming. Would Lovelock agree that even if the earth warms, if the tropical troposphere doesn't do so more than elsewhere then CO2 is not to blame? This part of McKitrick is based (very reasonably, in my view) on the much-touted climate models - which clearly Lovelock does not trust in other ways. It's a key clarifying question for me at the moment. Its practical consequence might be that even in our stupidity and greed we avoid burdening the world's poorest with our unsound theories and/or scams. This time Kaiser Wilhelm doesn't lead to Hitler and all that.

    I'd be happy to elucidate if I can.

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  10. At 90 he is fully vindicated. There are no serious challenges now to [Jim Lovelock's] Gaia Theory ...

    Well, actually, there are.

    [James Lovelock] was further vindicated yesterday by the declassification of pictures suppressed by Bush showing the extent of ice melt in Alaska.

    As someone who lives in Alaska, [struggling for polite way to put this] that is tosh.

    In 2008, the ice pack depth for Alaskan glaciers increased 20 feet, for the first time since records have been kept. (Roughly 100 years).

    2008 was the third coldest year on record. So far, 2009 is scarcely going to be any warmer.

    Last October, barges that carry supplies to western villages had to turn back because the ocean froze over three weeks sooner than normal.

    We have no reliable information about the arctic ice pack before 1979. So how the heck can we say what is normal, or not?

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  11. Yes, not sure anyone is ever fully vindicated about anything.

    As purveyors of doom go, though, I'm sure Lovelock is of the first order.

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