No-one saw it coming. Well maybe not quite no-one...

Back in 2001/2 a couple of friends were thinking about buying houses and asked for my opinion on the future prospects of the UK housing market

My take was that, even back then, the cost of housing was moving ahead of historical affordability levels and there was no way that house prices could keep rising faster than people's wage rises.

I guestimated that house prices would peak in the Summer of 2003, then fall back 10-20%, quite sharply

Which, of course, didn't happen




or rather it did happen, but in nothing like my estimated timescale

My mistake was that back then, before my full-on Conspiraloonery days, I assumed that the people responsible for our government and banks were not amoral sociopaths; fully committed to the path of deliberately wrecking millions of lives

Only an amoral psychopath would have encouraged the boom to continue beyond the 2002/03 levels, to a point where the inevitable economic correction would have to be so large it would become a national, and international, calamity

Make no mistake, a ghastly economic crash was a 100%, guaranteed, dead cert, inevitable consequence of the way our economy was being run, and anyone who says no-one saw it coming is either a liar or a fucking idiot

Now, as it happens, I've concluded that only a minority of the people who claim that no-one saw it coming are liars.

The majority really are fucking idiots; easily manipulated, greedy, dissonant, fearful idiots

You can take pretty much anything you've even seen written or said in the mainstream media about economic and financial affairs over the last ten years and forget it. It was all Wrong and yet the people who earned a living peddling Wrong are still at their jobs peddling a new brand of Wrong. For all the good they did anyone, they may as well have stayed at home, playing with themselves and eating cheesy wotsits, and not bothered going into work for the last ten years

Better than a career in journalism or banking, especially when combined with self-abuse

The same also applies to millions of people employed in the service sector over the last decade. A ridiculous number of people have been whacking off, playing silly games and kidding themselves that they were engaged in meaningful work.They enjoyed an undeservedly high standard of material living off of worthless IOUs paid to foreigners who've been working in sweat shops and fields on their behalf.

So preoccupied did the British become with getting rich (sic.) off the back of shuffling paper that we took to importing several million immigrants to wait on us and wipe our kids' arses

This was all bonkers and wrong on so many levels

And there came a point where you would have to be an idiot yourself to believe that no-one in a position of power saw the inevitable collapse coming

It is also worth remembering that the infrastructure for a full-blown police state was being rushed-in at the same time the debt bubble was being inflated to calamitous levels

I now firmly believe that the people responsible for our governments and banks truly are amoral psychopaths, engaged in deliberate economic and social warfare against the rest of us, and the quality of my spooky predictive powers is now several orders of magnitude greater than it was seven or eight years ago

Put simply, if everything really was the result of a cock up rather than a conspiracy why is it that the apparent cock ups virtually always end up favouring the same class of people?

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And whilst on the subject of dissonant bullshit...

There are some interesting parallels between the mainstream coverage of the recent economic boom and the Man Made Global Warming narrative

Each involved people looking at graphs of recent upward trending data, extrapolating those trends way, way up and fabricating explanations as to why this time it is different and why the upward trend was going to continue for the foreseeable future.

Both groups of rampers, economic and MMGW, have had the bulk of the mainstream media, industry and government on their side

In opposition to the people who believe that Man Made Global Warming, like house prices, could only go up there was a minority of people arguing that global mean temperature, like house prices, is cyclic, that there are signs a turning point has been reached and a downturn could well be on the cards

If and when it is established that a turning point has been reached, we will doubtlessly be told that (virtually) no-one saw it coming and that the Man Made Global Warming advocates were acting on the consensus of opinion of the majority of the experts

Bullshit

As with predictions about which way the economy was heading, consensus counts for absolutely fuck all

Either something is right or it isn't

And popular climate 'science', as it is currently practiced, has a lot more to do with politics and story telling than hard, testable science

There's a world of difference between hard sciences like chemistry and physics, which involve testable, repeatable processes and the more complex, chaotic natural sciences, such a climatology and evolutionary theory; which involve making up stories to explain that which has already happened and which is unlikely to happen again in quite the same way

It is easy enough to whip up an experiment to prove or disprove a theory about gravity. A lot harder to come up with something repeatable and testable which explains where wombats came from or if it is going to snow in New Orleans next week

Which is why the often-repeated claims that Man Man Global Warming is all about hard-science are bollocks

Staring at graphs of natural systems and kidding yourself that you've come up with a computer model which tells you what's going to happen next, be it with the weather or the financial markets, is a mug's game and will inevitably end up with only one result.

My favourite comment from the 1,000 or so posted underneath this recent article. Reference to to 'serious' scientists, i.e. scientists who agree with the views of the commentator, is as good an indicator that the writer is an utter twunt as any I know.

And, remember, whenever commenting about MMGW underneath news articles, any stories about unusually cold temperatures or heavy snowfall are examples of 'weather'. Any stories about unusually high temperatures or Hurricane Katrina are examples of 'climate'. 'Climate' stories are inherently more significant than 'Weather' stories'

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A few days ago Lord Patel, because he knows I enjoy this stuff so much, sent me a copy of the latest press release from the Met Office. It's a corker...


30/12/2008 11:38

Met Office (National) (Met Office)

Pacific Continues to Influence Global Climate

2009 is expected to be one of the top-five warmest years on record, despite continued cooling of huge areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Nina.

According to climate scientists at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia the global temperature is forecast to be more than 0.4 C above the long-term average. This would make 2009 warmer than the year just gone and the warmest since 2005.

During La Nina, cold waters rise to the surface to cool the ocean and land surface temperatures. The 2009 forecast includes an updated decadal forecast using a Met Office climate model. This indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.

Professor Chris Folland from the Met Office Hadley Centre said: "Phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina have a significant influence on global surface temperature. Warmer conditions in 2009 are expected because the strong cooling influence of the recent powerful La Nina has given way to a weaker La Nina. Further warming to record levels is likely once a moderate El Nino develops."

These cyclical influences can mask underlying warming trends as Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, explains: "The fact that 2009, like 2008, will not break records does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming - the period 2001-2007, with an average of 14.44 C, was 0.21 C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000." ENDS


Wow! Warmest year for four years! Maybe...

Outstanding!

The Met Office has now taken to reporting predictions, predictions from people with an unparalleled record for making shit predictions, as if they were fact.

They're getting pretty desperate now

and really beyond parody

And, sure enough, this prediction was faithfully reported as 'news' by the press agencies straight away

The implication of the Press Release it that the deep ocean is acting as a huge heat sink, hiding all that 200 years' worth of alleged surplus warming out of the way for the time being. I would love to see some data that proves it's actually warmer down there - because everything I've seen to date points to nothing of the sort

As with the now discredited ramping of the housing and debt markets, this MMGW thing is now getting beyond the point where the people ramping it can claim honest error. Their subjectivity has become quite blatant. We're heading into outright dishonesty now.

Just like our fucked up financial services industry, the MMGW lobby is trying to tide itself over with some short-term fudging; in the hope that things will somehow turn back their way before the fudging is more widely comprehended

And, as with the now discredited ramping of the housing and debt markets, I'm not claiming for a second that the majority of people who have Faith in MMGW are being deliberately dishonest - the boundless human capacity for self-delusion, dissonance, religious belief and self interest can account for much of what is going on

But not all of it

There is no good reason to believe that the top people behind the MMGW agenda, or our economy, do not understand the inevitable consequences of what they are doing

and there's every reason to believe that they do understand what they are doing

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