Evening MT,

No you’ve not misread me, and I doubt I’ve lurched to the right. But fair play, I did deserve that. (Although I felt the Obama cheapshot was far too tempting once it occurred to me after writing about Borlaug)

There was interesting piece in the observer some months back, I forget who wrote it, but the crux of the article was that in order to become an extremist you need only associate with people you agree with.

I’m no Tory, but I understand why they believe what they believe. Similarly, as someone on the left I’m often embarrassed by some of the ‘meddling lefties’ you mention and am keen to distance myself. Not on policy or even ideological grounds, but for the often flatfooted and emotionally charged way they drive their point home. But regarding the consensus on CO2 emissions? Agreed.

I only meant to use political correctness to explain why the right are skeptical on climate change. Coming from an immigrant family myself I completely take your point; only I feel that it is so obvious it needn’t be said anymore as we’ve already won many of those battles. An example I can give you is that in the other language I speak its perfectly acceptable and commonplace to refer to your wife or girlfriend as (accurately translated) “my woman”. Tends not to go down too well over here…despite the term’s complete lack of sexist connotations in many other countries.

Yes, the government has a responsibility to protect the rights of minorities. However it doesn’t have the right to impose the values of the minority onto the majority (‘Winterville’ anyone?). The comparison to Sharia Law was meant to convey an all too personal belief of mine, that the laws of God should not be enforced through the laws of man.

I’ve never seen politics as the difference between left and right, but more akin to a giant chessboard. There are just too many variables, too many ways to lose. Whether we’re talking about climate change, or indeed any hotly contested policy area, it’s never really a fight of two answers to the same question. It’s a fight over the question itself.

I stand by the main thrust of what I previously said; politicising science is a mistake, and human potential is far too great to ever allow the sky to fall. Ideology is the worst thing to allow in the way of all this.

Stay with people who are seeking the truth; run from those who claim to have found it.

Wow, Livy. Have I been misreading you or have you lurched to the right? Of course science changes and, of course, scientific descriptions of the world are, like all descriptions, metaphors. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to science’s best estimate of what is happening, especially when the stakes are this high.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the undisputed facts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that we are pumping out more and more of it, plus the overwhelming nature of the scientific consensus, is enough for me.

What we need is a ‘clumsy solution’ which mobilises and reconciles hierarchical, individualistic and egalitarian power while recognising that fatalism is the rational default. Just because I think some lefties use fears of climate change to smuggle in a anti-capitalist message (just as some anti-immigrant groups do to argue against population growth) doesn’t mean I think the whole argument that we rich countries have to change the way we live is spurious.

As for political correctness. Yes maybe it does sometimes go too far, but I am old enough to remember when racism, sexism and homophobia were not only tolerated but conventional. So this is another social dialectic, from which we will hopefully emerge with a more mature way of dealing with real and imagined differences between people.

I like how you opted to use the phrase ‘hierarchical’ to describe a top down, regulatory approach to change. The complaint often heard from the right (even those who concede the crisis to be man made) is that the whole issue has been absorbed into a new form of ‘authoritarianism’. Their case is not wholly without merit.

My clumsy understanding of all this is that on a fundamental level you can’t sell science. Neither can you sell the notion that ‘scientific proof’ is a contradiction in terms; our entire understanding of the natural world is largely dependent on underlying, and sometimes problematic, theoretical assumptions. What the media like to label ‘scientific proof’ is actually a collection of models that work for the evidence and understanding we have at any given time. (Acknowledged…this obviously excludes many things like pure mathematics or Newtonian physics that we use to make things like roads and transportation systems. But even these laws fail beyond certain speeds)

On the egalitarian front I’m afraid the ‘meddling lefties’ have done this to themselves, but I wouldn’t worry about too many British Ann Coulters springing up in the near future. Europe is an interesting comparison but more often your conspiratorial right-wingers remind me of the effect political correctness has had on society and why so many people feel frustrated by it.

I’d welcome a counter argument to this and to be fair I probably deserve a bit of abuse for the following. I just came across a column written by an American hardliner and couldn’t resist. ‘Political Correctness’ has characteristics that are in some ways reminiscent of Sharia Law. One sector of the population has successfully managed to impose their cultural values, derived from political or religious ideology, onto society as a whole. What we now have is almost an extra constitutional body of law which can end careers and ruin lives – law that is not enforced by the courts but through the media and what they in turn control. Public opinion.

In a similar vein conservatives (and even apolitical people) distrust the politicisation of science. This is especially frightening when laymen and political pundits start pronouncing on such technically complex issues with a kind of authority and zeal that many PhDs aren’t brazen enough to attempt. I would tie this in with your ‘Individualist’ angle. It’s not entirely specious to point out that Galileo refuted Aristotle by disproving the notion that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter one. Or that not so long ago the broad consensus among an informed body of opinion actually centred around fears of global ‘cooling’.

Norman Borlaug developed something called ‘dwarf wheat’ which produced far heavier yields with shorter and stronger stalks, so that it wouldn’t collapse under the weight of its own grain. Due to his research and innovation, India, at the time ravaged by drought, famine and overpopulation, increased its wheat crop from 11 million tonnes to 60 million tonnes annually. He is credited with saving over a billion lives worldwide and was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1970.

Barack Obama has barely kept the lights on for a year.

But if human potential and innovation wasn’t what it is then we surely would have destroyed ourselves by now. The next Borlaug is out there, probably causing minor explosions in his mother’s basement and unable to have important people return his phone calls. But they will.

Livy

P.s. …I like how you felt the need to post a wikipedia link to Warren Buffet…