Coming soon to a local newspaper near you – your own customised climate catastrophe story. All those much loved local landmarks, weep as they disappear beneath the waves within 30 years.
Last month the Wiltshire Times reported that vast areas of south west England could be under water by 2050 due to global warming. Among the sites that could be lost is Gloucester Cathedral, sited at an elevation of 19 metres. Last year it was turn of the Dorset Echo to inform its readers that the waters would soon be lapping around the village of Lytchett Minster, a mere 17 metres above sea level. Measuring sea level rise is a difficult task, not least because land also rises and falls. Satellite data has helped but estimates still vary around a 1-2mm annual increase. Even at the higher rate, it would take over 8,000 years to lap the steps of these two sites.
Of course fear-inducing stories like these do not just suddenly appear. Behind them is a seemingly well-funded American green agitprop operation called Climate Central. Based in Princeton, New Jersey, it claims to work with news outlets “to produce compelling and scientifically accurate feature stories”, helped by its own research. On the flood stories, it supplies a free interactive map and web tools that can be used by often cash-strapped local media to produce catastrophe-laced stories, based on what are obviously wildly improbable sea level rises.
But it is not just local papers that take the Climate Central feed. Last year the Guardian, in “partnership” with Climate Central, ran a story titled, “’We dread summers’: dangerous ‘fire weather’ days are on the rise in northern California”. Published last November, it claimed that drought and fire weather were simultaneously overtaking regions across California. A month later, the L.A. Times was reporting that California received more precipitation in the last three months of 2021 than it got in the previous year. Mountains were said to be “heaped with historic amounts of snow”.
Climate Central seems to be heavily backed by the Schmidt Family Foundation – money originally funded by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and chairman of Google. Foundation president Wendy Schmidt is identified as the corporate secretary of the Climate Central founding and current board. Another board member running a Foundation is Carl Ferenbach from the High Meadows Foundation and Fund. The flood project is said to be funded by 12 Foundations, including Schmidt and Prince Albert of Monaco.
Among the academics involved is Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University. Oppenheimer is a noted hard-core green activist famous for his quote: “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialisation, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
In a detailed 2019 report on sea level and climate change, the American climatologist and writer Judith Curry concluded that recent changes in sea level are “within the range of natural sea level variability over the past several thousand years”. In her view, there was not yet any convincing evidence that sea level rise was associated with human-caused global warming. Other scientists agree with Curry. In 2015, a group of French oceanographers investigating the tropical Pacific concluded a human fingerprint was still too small to be observable by satellite altimetry, and the trend is “mainly due to internal variability”.
Looking at the historical record, we can see that the heyday for biblical flooding and sea level rise on a Climate Central scale was in fact around the time of some of the early dating for Noah’s Ark. Curry supplies the graph below.
As the last ice age released its grip, sea levels rose by over 120 metres. Huge quantities of ice, miles deep in places, covered Europe and in a relatively short time it melted, leaving much smaller amounts at the Poles. On the scale of measurement needed to show this dramatic melt, the change over the last few thousand years appears as an almost flat line.
In 2016, a group of cartologists compared satellite observations between 1985 and 2015 with accurate nautical maps from earlier centuries and found that on a global level, coasts had actually grown since the 1980s. Overall, coasts gained 13,565 km2 more than they lost to the seas. Furthermore, it was found that none of the world’s islands larger than 10 hectares had decreased in size. This finding might explain why the Maldives is still building resorts and airports close to the ocean.
The reasons land increases are varied and complex. Once the enormous weight of ice is lifted, land often bounces back up. In parts of Scandinavia, for instance, the effect is pronounced.
It is doubtful if Climate Central will be pulling its flood stunts in Oslo, for instance, where the sea level is falling by over 3mm a year.
The world is drowning in emotional, climate catastrophe claptrap. Expect it to get much worse in the near future at least. At the recent BAFTA awards, palace-dwelling Prince William introduced a clip stating the “planet is on fire”. He went on to praise television writers for inserting green alarmist messages into their work, calling them “innovative” and “emotive”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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“All this and the execrable Wheel of Time in Culture Corner.”
Delingpole I think missed out on a treat with Wheel of Time, though understandably, I think. The beginning does seem very Lord of the Rings, and it takes time for the majestic scope, originality and solid plotting and characterisation to become apparent. It would be easy to dismiss it early, never get far into it and come away as dismissive as Delingpole is here. It is in fact justly classed as one of the greats of modern fantasy writing. Far from being sub-Tolkien (which the first book can easily give the impression of), in fact it is almost completely different from any of Tolkien’s work, except in some superficial plot details, and a great complement to Tolkien, in being written from a thoroughly western conservative base without Tolkien’s Christian theology. Not that there’s anything wrong with Christian theology as a basis for art, but Jordan’s classic covers a whole separate area of western conservatism, and is much more American (in a good way).
But the Amazon interpretation is, indeed execrable. Unsurprisingly so, given that they have taken a profoundly conservative work and rendered it into a vehicle for modern woke ideology. In order to do so, they have necessarily gutted it of most that gave it any artistic depth (and introduced a lot of loathsome woke ideological crap).
As one reviewer correctly said of it: “They’ve co-opted this because…they are nowhere near talented enough to make their own story. They could never write something as great as Wheel of Time and have it be as successful, but they want to get the message, their standards and views out. And so they will co-opt something that’s great, inject their bullcrap into it, because they’re not talented enough to make their own, and then ruin it in the process.”
This is nothing unusual – people co-opting art to convey their own message. But it’s especially problematic in cases like this, where the message being pushed is the diametric opposite of the content of the art itself. It’s as though you were to take surrealist art and use it to somehow make conservative propaganda by fundamentally changing and “reinterpreting” it into representational traditionalist paintings, while keeping the attribution to the original artist.
Surrealist art was “reinterpreted” into advertising – there’s no “as if” about it – and the term “surreal” was “reinterpreted” as a synonym for “zany”, or, in the parlance of the especially intellectually challenged among the middle classes, as a synonym for “weird”, “nonsensical”, or “unexpectedly self-contradictory”.
But who watches film version of books anyway? Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was a superb literary achievement. I’ve stayed away from the films.
“Surrealist art was “reinterpreted” into advertising – there’s no “as if” about it“
And the artists involved would doubtless be figuratively spinning in their graves. Which is roughly the point I made.
“But who watches film version of books anyway? Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was a superb literary achievement. I’ve stayed away from the films.”
With some regrettable lapses, the LotR films were reasonable adaptations.
The overriding point is that an adaptation of a great work of writing is made into a film, by and large, by a no better than average film maker, so as you imply, it’s rash to have high expectations.
But the kind of intentional ideologically motivated, manipulative vandalism we are dealing with in the case of Wheel of Time is a rather different thing.
The Lord of the Rings trillogy was good.
The Hobbit trilogy was two movies too long. In fact, even the one movie could have been a few years shorter.
Yes, I pretty much agree with this guy:
Amazon’s Lord of the Rings – I’ve Got A Bad Feeling About This
FIVE SEASONS?????
Shove that right in there beside your vaccine mandate!
Got to have plenty of space for the strong empowered women to develop their characters while helping the pathetic men-children to find their inner homo….
Never been more grateful that I have boxed sets of Breaking Bad and Westworld to fall back on. Not to mention the early seasons of Route 66.
Binged the first 5 on Saturday. Usually any anti male, pc bs will turn me right off immediately. Didn’t find this so far.
I don’t mind strong women and long as it’s not women good man bad. The glass cannon spell casters need strong skilful male fighters or they are useless. Some Aisha whatever dislike men, some don’t. It took 3/4 of them to overcome one male spellcaster… etc.
Having never read the books and not knowing anything about it prior to watching it I quite enjoyed it. It was a bit formulaic D&D, 1 archer, 1 barbarian, 1 thief, 1 healer, 1 assassin in the party, but it works for a reason I guess. And the troll-orcs or trollocks was a bit unoriginal
I think your woke bullshit detector might need recalibrating. I’d prescribe a diet of pre-1950s films and literature only, for as long as it takes.
The “glass cannon” nature built into the idea of female magic users was difficult to avoid entirely, but even there they managed to transform the famously stoic and battle hardened warders into a bunch of cry babies.
There are certainly formulaic fantasy tropes built in, but they (in the books at any rate) are used as building blocks for a genuinely original work of huge scope and real depth. But that’s part of the reason why it’s easy to dismiss as mere sub-Tolkien rehash unless you persist with it through at least the end of the first book. Jordan I believe openly acknowledged a debt to Tolkien, but then again that’s the case (the debt, acknowledged or not) for most fantasy writers from the second half of the C20th onwards,
The D&D formulaic party construction aspect you mention is definitely a function of the TV series, not the book. In the book the characters are very young (about 17, at a guess) when they leave their village, and extremely naive. That’s vital to their development through the story. The TV series trashed all this by making them older, and gave them some actually abhorrent characters and histories, that are utterly wrong for the book roles.
I can’t speak to the book comparison ‘Having never read the books’. What’s really in your face wokey about it so far 5 in?
The whole thing is one long sjw lecture about race, gender roles, religious politics and sexual behaviour that the book story is twisted beyond breaking to fit. As I noted, it bears at best occasional, superficial relationship to the books, and in many significant aspects is diametrically opposite to the books’ approach to key issues.
If you can’t see it, it’s most likely because you don’t have any particular problem with the sjw world view, so its unlikely anything I write will mean much to you. If it doesn’t trouble you that a remote, isolated backwater village is portrayed as a more racially diverse place than a US port city, or that supposedly battle hardened, veteran, stoic warriors are portrayed as shrieking and crying in hysterical emotiveness over battle deaths, that men are systematically portrayed as emotionally incontinent and rarely even minimally competent, compared to the women characters, then you are watching it from a very different cultural place from mine. We would probably be speaking different languages. I can only suggest finding some of the many negative reviews out there and trying to read or view them with an open mind.
The animated version, The Lord of the Rings (1978) Directed by Ralph Bakshi was excellent, the others you didn’t miss much.
And don’t laugh at this, but I would say another animated film i’d consider a classic work of art, is Bambi (1942), not so much the story, but the artwork had incredible ambience in parts, it was clearly a labour of love, & beautiful animation.
Actually the film made me read the book
Ironically ‘evil cannot create only corrupt’ was a Tolkien theme.
I see the irony of which you speak – nice connection
There is little doubt now that the regime intends to murder the majority of the population
Yup.
Discreetly of course.
They’ve been killing over 20% of the UK population for years now, it was always likely to be extended, especially with the demographic crisis of an ageing population (caused by said measure).
Sorry, but it just was.
According to a recent London Calling it’s pronounced Oh-Micron.
Does the French President’s wife pronounce it ‘Ohhh, Macron….”?
O mi cron?
You should disassociate yourselves from James Dellingpole in order to retain your integrity. N Kirkpatrick
The plan is to kill us
They needed some sort of a solution…
(First they came for people who need an organ donor).
The War on Drugs – Bill Hicks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knq49PqsMLc
Bill is sorely missed and we need his commentary today more than ever.
Still cant get over the BBC RADIO FIVE documentary I heard about drug gangs in Bradford with a central character called Meggy – true life story – which basically spilled the beans on how many main drug dealers are informants, assets, they work with impunity, they get help to launder the money through the police and they tip off dealers who they supply who get busted by the police to make it look like they are doing their job.
‘Police informant and rival drug dealer who set up Yassar Yaqub’ – the claims about Meggy before he was jailed for murder
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/police-informant-rival-drug-dealer-16212313