I grew up in Louisiana and now live near Tampa, Florida. I told folks here that tar balls have been washing up on the shores of the Louisiana coast since I was a kid (I’m 50 years old now), and they are likely to continue doing so. When folks around here freaked out about the potential damage to the beaches, I reminded them that the hurricanes wash out much of the beach every summer, and that they are restored by barging in new sand from offshore.

Even though these are known facts, Florida Governor Chris suddenly wanted to ban oil drilling forever along Florida coastline after just months before pledging to support more new drilling. We have a scientist now exclaiming that we don’t know the long-term impact despite years of study from the Mexican oil disaster that reveals little / no evidence of a lingering problem.

The hysteria is purposeful – it serves political and financial aspirations, so when in doubt – follow the money.

Larry Ainsworth, USA

Thank you for Rob Lyons’ logical and compelling ‘slap-down’. I was, I admit, shaken and sobered by the more apocalyptic scenarios outlined by some regarding this spill (eg, Matt Simmons, Rev Lindsey Williams, etc.). Two observations, however:

(1) Avoidance of hyperbole and doomsday hustling is always made easier when the press is aggressive in getting to the real story and, by implication, when it (the press) is granted access to the terrain in which the story is unfolding;

(2) Now it is critical to unearth what, if any, political purposes lie behind the manner in which the United States government handled, or mishandled, the aftermath of this terrible spill.

No excuses, though: I was taken in.

Gordon Lull, USA

Rob Lyons has it so wrong about the Gulf oil spill. The dispersant Corexit has done exactly what it suggests on the tin: disperse! It hasn’t eliminated or removed the oil, it’s just dispersed it. Plus BP contractors are scooping up huge quantities of dead wildlife every night and hiding this from the public.

Lyons is one of those fools who buys the BP hype and lies sadly. Thankfully there are people who actually looked deeper than he did. For a reality check see here:

Tod McNeal, USA

Concerning Rob Lyons’ article on the BP oil spill:

I was one of those geeky kids that read Omni magazine and Scientific American in high school. And while I cannot, for the life of me, remember which magazine and what year, there was a very small article that stated that, much as you have, that oil spills are non-issues after a very short period of time.

I wish I could, somehow, find the original article, as that single article had an impact on my attitude towards media spin. And here you go writing an article that, effectively, notices the same thing from that article 30 years ago.

Kevin Benko, USA

‘Although it is perhaps hard to believe, the substitution of coal for wood was the first transition to a low-carbon economy.’

Yes, Colin McInnes’ assertion is hard to believe, because it is untrue. It is not the amount of CO2 that is produced which forms the issue, but the net production of CO2. Trees absorb CO2 as they grow, taking in CO2 produced as wood burns or decomposes. Coal doesn’t.

Francis King, UK

Colin McInnes has written a highly inspiring piece, but I’m puzzled by the claim that wood has ‘10 carbon atoms for every hydrogen atom’, and is therefore a more carbon-intensive fuel than coal.

I thought that cellulose (the main chemical component of wood) had an empirical formula of C6H10O5, which gives it five hydrogen atoms for every three carbons.

Are you cancelling oxygen against hydrogen in the ratio of water, and then taking the ratio of carbon to the remaining hydrogen? (This would mean no hydrogen contribution at all from the cellulose, although the lignin would provide some). What is the basis for this, as opposed to ignoring the oxygen (which is abundant in wood, but negligible in fossil fuels) or even cancelling the oxygen against CARBON in the ratio of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide?

I think a better argument could be made by comparing energy densities rather than carbon-hydrogen ratios.

George Carty, UK

All round the British coast the construction of a new fleet of biomass-fired power stations is underway, fuelled with directly imported wood chip. Stations from 20MW to 40MW will be joined by 300MW ones at Teesside and Port Talbot. So there may well be a peak in wood supplies!

Peak oil became a reality last year after a plateau since 2005 and a drop in global production of 2.6 per cent in 2009. Shale gas may delay a peak in gas for a few years or so until 2030, but coal will pass its peak by the mid-century.

Unfortunately, nuclear power in France is in crisis as 37 of its 58 strong fleet of reactors come up for their three-month long, 30-year inspections for the licensing of them for their final 10 years by 2015. So in the next ten years or so around 20 European Pressurised Reactors will be required or plans to upgrade pensioned for an extension will have to be laid. Only one EPR is under construction at Flamanville and is already delayed by two years. So there will be a progressive decrease in generation, a crisis for a country over-dependent on nuclear.

Nuclear power currently supplies 5.5 per cent of the world’s primary energy; only two per cent as electricity. There is no way that the number of nuclear power plants could be increased by 50 times to 20,000, nor that uranium production could be increased from 50,000 tonnes/year to 3.5million tonnes/year!

There is no commercial fast breeder available and the only fast reactor running is under conversion to destroy plutonium. Fusion is an illusion, there is no way that sufficient tritium could be produced to run even one reactor, let alone a world fleet, which would in any case be unaffordable.

Mankind will adapt by moving around less and making communities more self-sufficient in energy, food and local services.

John Busby, UK

It is glaringly obvious that Google’s privacy violation was carefully orchestrated by their code merchants to attain competitive advantage.

Such information garnered from their so called mishap will only serve as a catalyst to boost their search algorithm.

Until we become aware of the fact that big corporations such as Google, only care about profitability metrics and less about privacy, we will remain pawns in their computational game of chess as we unwillingly surrender our ‘adsense’ consciousness to them.

Kwasi Asiamah, UK

I think it’s important to distnguish between the natural desire for human, individual privacy and the need for protection against an overpowering state.

A lot of modern privacy issues aren’t to do with social modesty, but are about hiding from the increasing power of the state to control our lives.

So many minute aspects of life in modern society are now illegal that we seek privacy just to give us some social breathing space.

Smoking indoors in a pub, how we feed or talk to our children, what we say about our desires and our prejudices in public, whether we risk our lives by not wearing a helmet or a seat belt, many of these natural aspects of our behaviour are now illegal under the guise of ‘protecting’ us, even when we don’t want to be protected.

I like to separate the innate social need for privacy from the desire to avoid an overpowering state.

Andrew Denny, UK

Toby Steven’s analysis is thorough and clear-sighted, as usual.

He and I were both at the launch of the UK Information Commissioner’s Annual Report on 14 July, where copies of another ICO document were also available: their Code of Practice for Personal Information Online.

A message repeated throughout that Code of Practice is essentially this: the law on the processing of personal information is complex, evolving, and different from one country to another; under those conditions, the best approach is one based on ‘good practice’.

In other words, take responsibility for the information your organisation uses, treat it ethically and with common sense, and aim to exceed the principles of the law.

One practical example of how to do this is to define, propose and adopt a binding corporate rule (BCR) setting out how your organisation will accommodate the needs of multiple jurisdictions. The UK ICO has stated its support for this approach.

Regrettably, what hits the headlines tends to be news that another multi-national service provider has decided to behave as though only US law applies, or simply to ignore the more stringent legal requirements of other jurisdictions until they are forcibly called to order through legal action.

Robin Wilton, UK

Stop demonising deniers? Is Brendan O’Neill serious?

As a physics graduate myself who has investigated the various arguments around climate change in some detail I’ve come to realise that deniers are a bunch of deluded zealots and digusting liars who don’t know or care about science – they are only interested in misrepresenting the arguments for personal entitlement.

Quite frankly, O’Neill’s attitude to climate-change is not the least bit helpful. Lying about science is not OK!

Peter Pat, Australia

On the basis of the debate so far, there are a lot of people getting themselves worked up over nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea behind Street View. In fact, it’s incredibly useful to be able to see what a place you’re going to looks like before you visit. It appears to me that Google has made very reasonable - if not entirely successful - efforts to protect privacy while providing that service in respect of blurring photographs etc. The wifi data it has collected - inadvertently or otherwise - is almost certainly of no practical use to anyone other than the reason it was collected: to provide positioning information for devices that don’t have GPS.

While I don’t want Google or anyone else making illicit use of my personal information, this excessive reaction to any privacy-related issue is unhelpful since it will tend to discourage companies like Google from providing new services. Nor is there anything exceptional in what Google does. Think about it: my bank must know all sorts about me from my financial information. But I accept that loss of privacy in exchange for banking services.

The tiny risk to my privacy from such services is greatly outweighed by their usefulness, a sentiment illustrated well by the embarrassing failure of that Facebook revolt a few weeks back. Privacy campaigners who get all hot-and-bothered over Street View need to get out more… presumably when there are no cameras around.

Gavin Farmer, UK

AW Montford is just the kind of guy we need. No rabies. No hate. Always a touch of humour while making telling points against alarmism and government-directed science. But Montford admits that, like all of us, he may be wrong on some of this.

Let’s debate this way. We might get some truth without killing each other in the process.

Leo Buchignani, USA

I certainly don’t know as much about Bristle Cone pines as AW Montford, but with other trees I know a little about I always thought the size of the growth rings depended far more on rainfall than temperature. I know it might be possible to extrapolate average summer temperatures by using rainfall data approximated by tree ring evidence, but that would be very approximate indeed; so approximate, in fact, that it seems this explains why the graph does not show the ‘warm period’ we believe happened in the early part of the last millenium.

One is very right to be sceptical of the ‘hockey stick’ graph, and even I who am not a scientist would want to view the evidence compiled with a very large pinch of salt.

Thank you for bringing this to general attention.

John Denis Standeven, UK

Unlike Peter Taylor, my own process of questioning the science behind the man-made climate change hypothesis began with the realisation that C02 is a trace gas, and wondering how a change from 0.025 per cent to 0.04 per cent of C02 could cause such dramatic changes.

Investigation of this led me to the conclusion that gross assumptions were being made and that data was being made to fit presupposed conclusions. Man-mae climate change is a meme that fits in with deep cultural ideas about an original perfect state, the inherent corrupting effect of mankind, as well as anxieties associated with a crowded world with finite resources. My greatest concern is that all the energy spent on climate change and the economic solutions posited to ‘solve’ it distracts us from immediate and real environmental problems, and the real and practical solutions to them.

Cicero established a legal principle, cui bono?, (to whose benefit?) I suggest it should be rigorously applied to the powers driving the AGW argument.

Paul Schaefer, Australia

We don’t put ourselves into a class or category – such as ‘product’ in Google’s case – but are put into one by those who would objectify us for their own purposes. When an individual does this it usually means a difficult and unequal relationship based on stereotype – and best avoided – but when a corporation does it in the legal guise of an individual, with near monopolistic power over online activity which is fast becoming an essential part of life, there are serious problems that we should be aware of.

Our private data is important as it allows a more accurate designation of individuals into bite-sized packages of consumers and producers. The functionality of all organisations based on marketing commodities, can only be achieved by this objectivisation of us all. Google, like other producers of goods and services, must see its ‘products’ – technology, the energy it uses, its employees, knowledge of user-behaviour, and the money – in the same way; as units, things, statistics, capital. Not to do so challenges the very foundations of the relations of production and consumption largely taken for granted in our capitalised world

The central problem is the contradiction between the ideal world where private or public are merely a matter of location, and the real world where knowledge allows greater exploitation of ‘others’; in Google’s case through intervention and manipulation of where people go and behave, in private – an area, by definition, supposedly unseen by those outside.

These are the ‘things’ that inhabit any organisations’ reality, and this is what is ‘baked’ into the Google pie – the taken-for-granted notions of relations of production and consumption: where privacy, for the users and products, actually means inconvenience, inefficiency and missed opportunity for the corporation.

Malcolm Watts, UK

I think it is too optimistic to think that the reaction to the misleading ‘hockeystick’ graph and climategate will moderate the climate change alarmists’ message. There is now far too much money involved and too many in political reputations tied up in carbon trading and the like for the environmentalists’ message to fall away.

The reaction so far has been to downplay the factual errors with cosy investigations conducted by hand-picked teams of sympathisers. And then, everyone can carry on as if nothing had happened. So far this strategy is working.

All the carbon reduction targets, carbon trading and carbon taxes are still in place. Even after hell (and earth) freezes over politicians and campaigners will still say ‘cutting back on carbon was a good thing to do anyway’.

David Watt, UK

Simon Davies’ article Google has become an imperialist beast is either an ignorant piece of hype by a person with demagogic ambition, or the product of someone who just wants to sell copy by appealing to mass ignorance.

If anyone publishes information by tranmitting it on Wifi, unencrypted, or on an Internet server available to anyone anywhere who has a connection, it is already published. Imagine if someone publishes a book and then tries to restrict the readership by legal means – that would be absurd.

Facebook tightened security because, being in Silicon Valley, they did not realise just how pig-ignorant and stupid the general user is. If you transmit data somewhere, you must expect it to be read.

Malcolm Rose, France

Over the next four weeks, spiked will be holding a debate on Google and the issue of privacy. From search to email, from mapping services to Street View, Google potentially has access to a wealth of private information. And, as various privacy-related infringements seem to show, our privacy is not always taken seriously. Is Google too blasé towards those who use its products? And if so, why is privacy such a blindspot? Or does Google have a good record on privacy compared with other internet companies? We’ll be debating these and many more important questions in the coming weeks – let us know what you think here.

It’s very refreshing to hear Peter Taylor’s reasoned sceptical view, rather than that of the tin-foil hat brigade who seem to lead the charge on both sides of this debate.

I dare say there are many, like me, who do not have the scientific background to assess the available data for themselves and then come to a meaningful conclusion.

I find myself at odds with many from both sides. It is almost instinctual to baulk at the warnings of doom and apocalypse that we have heard, in so many other cases, before and which mostly came to nothing, but it is also hard to believe that international scientific opinion could be so widely corrupted, or at least so comprehensively misrepresented, and that man-made global warming is all over-inflated tosh.

I try to keep some perspective by simply assuming that the answer lies somewhere between these two scary extremes. This article gives me some hope, that I, and my fellow puzzled masses, might be taking a reasonable attitude to all this.

Steven M Dorif, UK

I read Peter Taylor‘s book Chill and found it completely convincing. In fact, it converted me from agnosticism to atheism (or should I say scepticism) about global warming. I sympathise with Taylor’s disappointment that nobody seems interested in debating his conclusions with him, particularly given his immaculate green credentials.

Unfortunately, now nobody seems to want to know the truth: ‘I’ve made up my mind. Don’t bother me with the facts!’ The absence of debate seems to be a symptom of the low state of the science surrounding the topic. Taylor and others are probably right in perceiving a corrupting effect in the way the whole global warming issue has been handled.

Twelve years have passed since the warming stopped, but nobody really seems to have noticed. The shouts of global warming catastrophe are as loud as ever. Perhaps the public have been warned so often that global warming is happening, by a consensus of scientists, that it believes what it is told, rather than what it experiences. This is not healthy.

I salute Peter Taylor’s perseverance in digging out the truth and his courage in publishing it, no doubt losing some friends in the process. It was once said that the Old Testament prophets were not fore-tellers, but forth-tellers. Taylor has done an invaluable job of forth telling. I just hope his prophetic words are listened to before the IPCC leads us all to perdition.

Tom Addiscott, UK

I agree with Peter Taylor and came to similar conclusions in the mid-Nineties after being funded by the ESRC to study the science and politics of the IPCC. I regret now that I did not at the time ensure more publicity for my findings, but the big spending spree on ‘combating global warming’ research had by then started and academe would not listen, and soon journals would not publish ‘sceptics’. The powerful research lobby in general and their funders in Whitehall and green NGOs were reluctant to give up a new research arena with lots of numbers for model building. As a result growing proportions - from green economics and sustainable technology, from medicine and philosophy - all jumped on the cut CO2 bandwagon.

I also agree with Taylor’s analysis of the lamentable responses by the greens even to his work. Only I believe that it is less their ideology that creates so much intolerance in the first place. Rather it is their own ‘bureaucracy’ and reliance on official funding and esteem that now commits them to remain loyal to a failed project.

The battle is by no means over. Indeed, the global green movement has become a ‘big’ business, a wealthy group of competing organisations in need of continuity and state support. By all means find a substitute for fossil fuels, where it makes sense, but don’t force decarbonisation down mankind’s throats through moral blackmail and bribery.

I am sorry Peter – you, and perhaps even me, though we are now pretty old, will have to start again, this time with humanity at the centre of out work.

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, Editor of Energy & Environment!, UK

As a scientist myself I found the Matt Ridley interview most refreshing – and, yes, a lot more rational than the morbid ramblings of so many pop stars and the like on how the world doesn’t need people to survive and we are all just wasting this lovely, blue ball by being alive.

There are countless billions of other planets in the universe, presumably with varying capacities to support life and yet I get the impression the current, environmentally-enthused chattering classes would happily see humans wiped off the face of this one in order to have the Earth preserved as a museum piece. They forget we are part of this planet, as much a contributor to its complex growth as the micro-organisms and meteor strikes that went before us.

When I see the smiles of my children, I know at least some people are enjoying it despite the anti-people squad’s gloomiest predictions. Of course we should save energy where possible – and who knows what other clean energy sources remain to be found by people perhaps not yet born – but we must not turn science into some babbling round a presumed infallible crystal ball in order to further agendas that have nothing to do with science.

Mary Dysko, UK

I don’t view myself as informed enough to have a totally clear view on this issue, but what Peter Taylor says rings true.

I have become increasingly disturbed by the intolerance of the environmental lobby and the evangelical and intolerant nature of their views. The green movement is becoming more and more like some sort of secular religion with dissenters dismissed as ‘deniers’, in other words, heretics. If the green lobby is wrong then we are spending a fortune on measures that are, at best, ineffectual or, at worst, positively harmful. Either way it is a gross misuse of resources.

Andrew Dougal, UK

Thank you very much for Peter Taylor’s article.

My family has farmed the same land for the past 500 years. Our experience is that there are climate cycles beyond human control. For example in the past 200 years, we have planted olive trees in three times in one particular area and after a period of years the trees would always be killed by a frost. Today the olive trees have already been planted once again, and statistically these trees should be killed in the next 10 to 15 years.

I know this is not significant, when talking about climate as a whole but it does seem to suggest something cyclical at work

Paul Ravents, Spain

The science constantly changes as we learn more and books like Chill by Peter Taylor are often out of date by the time they are published.

A new report led by Leonid Polyak from the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University is definitely worth a look at – it is the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice. Carried out by a team of scientists from five countries, it found that the recent retreat is the worst in thousands of years. This has to be looked at in context with the whole planet and it is the word ‘thousands’ (note the plural) of years that needs to be taken note of.

Paul Bennett, UK

Kudos on a great article from Peter Taylor – an environmentalist with integrity!

Beyond all the dishonesty and hidden agendas that he and other brave authors have rightly pointed to, the diversion of funding from authentic environmental improvement initiatives into the hands of these people is criminal.

It should be very clear by now that those so-called environmentalist organisations who are jumping into bed with government are now motivated solely by the huge amounts of money they have managed to attract to themselves through what looks like deceit. They care no more about the environment that they do about science.

Tom Delozier, USA

I really appreciate the research Peter Taylor has done and his reasoned approach. When people start saying science absolutely ‘knows’ something with certainty, it’s very worrying, not to mention unscientific.

It seems we are betting vast amounts of scientific expertise and money, as well as the future well-being of Third World citizens, on being right about the cause of the warming. Even if we are right, it doesn’t follow that we can effectively reduce the amount of carbon we produce.

My suggestion is that we put the truly vast amounts of money (and expertise) towards developing mechanisms for dealing with the one forecast we can make with reasonable confidence: that the world’s climate will continue to vary unpredictably.

Sue Burdekin, Australia

Letters responding to: Six-and-a-half billion reasons to be cheerful, by Tim Black

It’s fair enough to be optimistic. It makes life bearable when things may get you down. So maybe that’s why Matt Ridley has written his book, The Rational Optimist.

I try to be optimistic on pretty much every level, but there is little cheer you up in the bits quoted in Tim Black’s article. For example (and of course my thoughts are an emotional response, not a researched one) the world’s population may well be slowing because of China’s one child policy. That’s a pretty significant number.

As for food production and the use of natural resources, well, yes, we can produce more with less and create more with less but for how long and at what cost to the planet? As for DTT and acid rain, well, it was because they stopped being used that things actually improved. How about the Ozone layer hole and aerosols? They got banned and the hole got smaller. That was a fairly significant thing to do.

On top of all this there is the simple fact that the rest of the planet is paying the price for our use of it. Now that might be improved if we all consumed less but, seriously, is that what is being suggested here? No. And if we aren’t going to consume less and the rest of the world has the right to live as we in the West do – to consume what we do, to destroy what we do, to expect what we do – then overpopulation is a real and pressing issue.

William Zappa, Australia

Letter responding to: We must stop saying ‘The Science demands…’, by Tim Black

We in the US had a politician not too long ago who claimed that he would make policy ‘based on science, not ideology’. Yet, as Mike Hulme argues, that simply cannot be done. (Unless campaign contributions are now science – but I digress.)

Some years ago in a survey of economists, stopping global warming did not make the top 10 of policy concerns. Alleviating global poverty, to allow people to cope with global warming, was seen by this group as more important.

I agree with Hume that in the policy realm we are addressing the wrong questions, or rather addressing them with a fundamentally wrong approach: ‘Those much more challenging and unsettling arguments we’d rather not have. And so the convenient arguments, the much more narrowly bounded ones about good and bad science, take their place.’

I very much enjoyed reading this article.

Steve Colby, USA

Letter responding to: We must stop saying ‘The Science demands…’, by Tim Black

Putting the definite article in front of ‘science’ turns it into idolatry. Differing sides in the climate change debate refer to particular scientists as if they were oracles, rather than researchers.

There are fewer things as complex as climate and how it changes over time. Some components may be simple, but the whole thing would make a Rube Goldberg invention seem as simple as a can opener by comparison.

Unfortunately, researchers themselves are not free of political and ideological bias. For every Senator Imhofe on the ‘right’ there is an Al Gore on the ‘left’. Not that either of them qualify as a scientist.

Tikhon Andrew Gilson, USA

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate , by Nathalie Rothschild

While it is true that aspects of green thinking are irrational, loony and misanthropic, we do have to learn that resources are finite. We cannot carry on living as we are.

The blind worship of technology and industry, and a corresponding hatred of nature and the countryside, promoted by spiked is every bit as dogmatic and crazy as when greens advocate the reverse.

Nicolas Jones, UK

Letter responding to: The low Horizons of modern society, by Rob Lyons

A good article and I agree with Lyons in principle. Overstating the significance of the disaster is indeed wrong and he makes a good point about the fact the rig workers’ deaths have rarely been mentioned.

However, it’s easy to understand why elements of the greens are making the most they can out of this incident. Given the enormous amount of unjustifiable resistance stemming from the oil lobby against action on climate change and moving to alternative fuels, incidents like this are the best opportunity to fight fire with fire.

Is this right? No, it’s a misrepresentation of the facts. Is it necessary, given the stakes at play and the lack of a rational dialogue? Maybe. It’s certainly tempting.

I agree entirely that oil is a necessary component of our economy at this time and probably for quite a while yet. However, it is very difficult to encourage transition away from oil to cleaner renewable fuels while the price of oil remains so low.

As such, the argument that oil must be maintained loses some legitimacy. I cannot see how we can expect to reduce carbon and other emissions from oil until the market is seriously biased, quickly. This spill may be an opportunity, if an unethical one.

Gordon Young, Australia

Let’s start with the basics: medical evidence suggests that children do not need a diet that is different from adults. Medical experts tell us that human breast milk is the best food for new-born babies and that weaning or introducing soft food can be begin at around six months. Not surprisingly, where there has been discussion about the right age at which to make the switch away from breastfeeding, the food industry research tends to come down in favour of ‘sooner rather than later’. But once children have been weaned, current medical advice suggests parents can give their baby ‘almost any home-cooked family food, as long as it is mashed or pureed and doesn’t have any added salt or sugar’ (1).

Yet many ‘children’s foods’ are, in fact, high in fat, salt and sugar. Sustain undertook a survey of foods marketed for babies and young children, analysing the nutritional information provided for 107 foods marketed for babies and young children available from UK supermarkets (2). The report details how the UK baby food market is worth an estimated £315million annually and how many food products marketed for babies and young children carry claims about their nutritional value, such as ‘added vitamins’, ‘contains calcium’ or ‘no added salt’.

The report’s findings were concerning. Several products contained high levels of sugars and/or saturated fat, with two leading brands - Cow & Gate and Heinz - having several products that contained levels of sugar or saturated fat higher than those in adult products widely considered to be ‘junk food’. Once children get used to eating some of these items regularly, home-produced food can begin to taste bland in comparison.

This takes its toll on family meals. Either everyone has to suffer the delights of the children’s favourites or meals degenerate into a cafeteria-style selection for harassed parents who can find they have to cater to a range of tastes. According to a report in the Guardian newspaper, 43 per cent of parents prepare up to three different meals per night (3).

Marketing children’s foods allows the food industry to play on parental concerns about their child’s development. Vague claims that suggest health-giving properties and imply protection from ailments help persuade some parents that these foodstuffs are necessary. Food companies try to create positive images of happy family life based around buying and eating their products. Most of us believe we are too media savvy to fall for it, but given the lack of confidence many parents report in their own parenting skills, is it any wonder some people feel obliged to buy these products? Aggressive promotions and marketing of children’s foods can also undermine parental guidance to children on what they should be eating.

It’s not just the food we see in supermarkets that is a problem. Most restaurants commonly offer a children’s menu that consists solely of fish finger and chips, pasta, pizza or burgers. Food writer Joanna Blythman compares our expectations of a children’s menu in restaurants with French and Italian experiences: ‘In most parts of the world …children are expected to eat more or less the same as adults from a very early age.’ (4) Why don’t our restaurants offer a half-sized portion of the normal menu items instead of restricting it to such narrow choices?

But does any of this really matter? So what if indulgent parents want to make a rod for their own back and allow their kids to call the shots with a menu comprised of highly processed foods?

Like it or not, this country is facing an obesity epidemic. Obesity in children has risen by over 40 per cent in the past 10 years and the UK now has the highest rate of childhood obesity in Europe (5). Many children simply do not eat the types of foods that for generations our ancestors have thrived on. Staples such as fruit and vegetables are no longer regular items in children’s diets, while 96 per cent of children do not eat the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day (6).

This matters. It is not scaremongering to consider that poor diet may contribute to ill-health for many of our children. According to the World Health Organisation: ‘The most significant health consequences of childhood overweight and obesity that often do not become apparent until adulthood, include: cardiovascular diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke); diabetes; musculoskeletal disorders, especially osteoarthritis; and certain types of cancer (endometrial, breast and colon).’

It is quite simple: children need a good, balanced diet that includes a wide range of fruit and vegetables. The Children’s Food Campaign believes that promoting ‘children’s food’ at the expense of good food is causing huge problems for parents and children. The food industry needs to behave responsibly and ensure that children’s food is clearly labelled and not aggressively promoted to young children.

For us, if the future of food is going to be a positive one, we need to curb advertising of high fat, salt sugar foods. Just as importantly, we need investment in real food education that includes growing and cooking food at school.

Jackie Schneider works for the Children’s Food Campaign.

(1) Weaning your baby

(2) Junk food for babies?, Sustain

(3) Guardian, 16 August 2005

(4) Bad Food Britain, by Joanna Blythman

(5) Department of Health, Forecasting Obesity to 2010, 2006

(6) National Nutrition and Diet Survey

Meaning

The meaning of words is important. Wittgenstein argued that words are more than simply true or false descriptions of things; the tone, force, and context of their use convey additional meaning. But these concepts are contestable. Indeed, the concept of security has a long and honourable history of contestation. In the 1950s, Hans Morgenthau provided the ‘classical definition’, based on the relationship between nation states. By the early 1980s, Barry Buzan and the Copenhagen School conceived of security centred on the individual. Following a succession of natural disasters and technological accidents in the late 1980s, together with the appalling genocide in Rwanda of 1994, this new ‘individual’ dimension to security was crystallised in the 1994 UN Development Programme report, New Dimensions of Human Security. Security became conceived as a series of ‘new’ threats - health, energy, environment and food - pertinent to the individual. Yet, simply ‘tagging’ food with the security label makes little difference to the reality of its production, supply, and consumption.

Regardless of the security theory you subscribe to, the key constituents of security that theorists do agree upon, include: some referent object - an asset - to be made secure; a wilful, malicious, capable agent that threatens this asset; and, some form of counter-measure, or protection, deliberately placed to oppose the threat in defence of the asset. Where these three components intersect is what theorists understand by the concept of security.

However, contemporary usage of the term security wilfully misconstrues these component parts. The threat, rather than originating from deliberate, malicious, human agency, is now conceived of as emanating from any source. Anything and everything - swine flu, weather, transport, volcanic ash - is erroneously conceived of as a security issue. Thus, everything becomes security and nothing is security; the term is rendered, unhelpfully, meaningless. Furthermore, the inclusion of counter-measures as an integral part of the definition is conveniently ignored. The result is a framing of security debates solely in terms of vulnerability and the misanthropic idea that we are powerless to overcome life’s challenges. As Karl Popper noted, ‘All of life is problem-solving’; to conceive of security absent of this key variable is a disingenuous and analytically immature approach to problem-solving.

A further key distinction is that security is not just a concept, but also a value. Moreover, security is often counterposed to another value - liberty. The contemporary pursuit of security over and above liberty, whether in food or any other subject, reflects an existential challenge to an enlightened pursuit of the good society. The gradual erosion of the individual’s freedom to choose to behave responsibly, or irresponsibly for that matter, in favour of codifying responsibilities within the more constraining value of security caricatures political expediency and purposelessness politics.

Expediency

The fact that contemporary interpretations of security become meaningless is not entirely lost on policymakers and politicians. They traduce the subtleties of the concept to their own advantage. For politicians, seemingly unable to construct meaningful ideological purpose of their own, security has become the Zeitgeist upon which they conveniently hang all governmental activity. If theorists crystallised the concept of individual security in abstraction in 1994, then 9/11 catalysed the political classes to operationalise it wholesale through the public sector. Nor has this narrow usefulness been lost on the private sector. If the public sector sees security as a convenient political reason for being, then the private sector, including academia, see security as a commercial opportunity or a route to research grants and consultancy.

Meanwhile, in the real world of security, it is far from clear that all eventualities impinging upon food genuinely fall into the security category. Indeed, the little evidence that does enumerate such incidents suggests that they are few and far between.  The most comprehensive piece of research into observable impacts of deliberate malicious interventions into the food supply chain indicate that, of the 376 globally reported cases of security breaches over 58 years, some 396 people have died and some 5,127 people have been harmed. This hardly amounts to an existential challenge.

Rather than deal with the real issues of a globally imbalanced food system - trade barriers that favour developed nations, a reluctance to embrace technology and science, a misconstrued interventionist-conservationist approach to economic development - policymakers contextualise food within a fearful agenda of population growth, resource shortage, and a host of other obscure contradictions such as food riots, obesity, junk food, and neo-colonial ‘land grabs’. This results in simultaneous fears of too much food (obesity) and too little food (undernutrition), which are surely contradictory. Having created a sense that security has been lost through emphasising vulnerability and moral panics, policy-makers construct convenient, seen-to-be-doing-something solutions as though that was the epitome of purposeful political action.

Risk

The securitisation of all aspects of the provision of food chimes with the most pervasive and pernicious of contemporary decision-making processes: risk management. If the concept of food security is contested, then its decision-making frame of reference is controversial. Like food security, the term risk management had little resonance in English language or culture prior to the 1980s. Yet, today, there are many ‘centres for risk analysis’ in academic institutions, countless public and private sector jobs with ‘risk manager’ in their titles, and virtually every aspect of contemporary life cannot proceed absent of a ‘risk assessment’. The public consciousness of risk is deep. One might be forgiven for wondering how we managed before without risk management?

There are at least three debilitating flaws in security’s association with risk management. First, risk management strives, disingenuously, to measure security risks in terms of probability and impact. However, authentic probabilities require the presence of repeatable and corroborable data, while meaningful impact necessitates an objective measurement of outcome. Yet, for almost all security situations, data are too sparse to be significant and impact is entirely dependant upon one’s subjective experience of the consequences. Thus, both probability and impact are artificially constructed by subjective political imperative rather than objective scientific analysis. Second, the imposition of risk management’s processes and tools - risk assessment, risk matrix, and risk register - upon inherently subjective and unpredictable events, merely confer and compound the superficial appearance of objectivity. Finally, decisions are made on a possibilistic ‘what-if’ rather than probabilistic ‘what-is’ basis.

This what-if approach is expressed, by default, in apocalyptic terms, simplistically articulated as a threat of existential and immediate proportions to humanity, absent of any intervening and modifying countermeasures. There is no end to that strategy. Worse, to then act as though the most extreme scenario is happening, means that it is you reorganising society not the threat. Invariably, such action is taken on the basis of the precautionary principle which, itself, is invariably trumped by the law of unintended consequences.

Conclusion

Food security is a loaded concept. At best, it is a confusion of meanings, more obfuscating than illuminating. At worst, it is pathological risk management masquerading as unquestioned political orthodoxy. It conveys a contemporary worldview that starts from the paradoxical presumption that humans are helpless victims and consumer-based destroyers of resources, rather than purposeful agents that can produce and be resourceful.

Moreover, the securitisation of food will be accompanied by many of security’s other distractions - an increase in surveillance, a curtailment of liberty and privacy, open debate subject to security’s inherent culture of censorship, a heavy dose of bureaucratic ineptitude, and an unacceptable cost in terms of both wasted resource and an erosion of historically enlightened values. The concept of food security promotes security over liberty, in keeping with this society’s recent ideological drift from individual freedom to an enforced code of moral conduct. While the pursuit of a policy of ‘food liberty’ would be deeply ironic, it might at least signify a thoughtfully enlightened u-turn. If the concept of food must be tagged with anything, then ‘provision’ might be more appropriate.

The simplistic securitisation of food under the rubric of food security says very little useful for the provision of food; but, it reveals quite a lot about us.

Steve Gibson is a lecturer on concepts of risk, security, intelligence, and resilience at Cranfield University, Shrivenham.

Letter responding to: Why scepticism is still ‘the highest of duties’, by Frank Furedi

Another excellent column by Furedi. Here in the US, Americans used to pride themselves on their free-thinking individualism. Now we seem to have devolved into a fundamentalist culture where blind faith and dogmatic belief, in both religious and secular matters, are often championed over intellectual inquiry and curiosity.

This means that scepticism is often equated with godless immorality by the religious and with ‘denialism’ (what an ugly canard that word is) by true believers in man-made global warming and other politically correct, secular causes. One side cites scripture as the source of Absolute Truth, the other scientific consensus. Both deploy moral condemnation of anyone who questions or disagrees as a way to forestall the open debate they prefer not to have.

John Strausbaugh, USA

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

I am not a member of any fringe party and I feel Lyons’ article was fair enough as far as it went. But what it needs now is a series of follow-up articles on other important aspects of nuclear power such as waste disposal, the problems of handling the huge up-front investment financing and, above all, the need for the government to take a decision and get on with it. A decade or more has gone by without any elected government taking any major decisions (other than to put off doing anything). Meanwhile the enormous lead times inherent in this industry have been squandered and we are in danger of having wasted a golden opportunity of getting a balanced national fuel policy that will get us through the impending fuel crisis.

What’s the problem?

Reverend Alexander Hardcastle, UK

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

I’m not a green, and actually I’m pro nuclear energy. However, every time the discussion comes up, detractors always ask me the following questions, to which I don’t know the answer:

1) The toxic waste seems to be pretty difficult and risky to handle. If buried, it might even contaminate ground water. How do we deal with this?

2) Who determines which countries should have access to this technology and which don’t? What about rogue states or tyrants?

Any help would be welcome,

Enrique A Castro, Venezuela

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

Thank you for a well presented and unemotional summary of the facts.

If only the agenda-driven, environmentalists could embrace even one iota of the gift that is nuclear-driven electric power generation!

It has the remarkable property of serving the social and environmental wellbeing of the entire civilised world, while simultaneously countering the political and economic instability attached to the hegemony of unstable, tyrannical oil exporting states.

And by extension, it boosts the will of the wealthy, developed world to allow its potential to lift countless millions of poverty stricken peoples out of brutal misery and suffering.

Malcolm Ross, USA

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

I agree entirely with Lyons, especially as I have helped Sweden build up its nuclear competence, and watched it wither away.

The trouble is I don’t think the UK has the ability to a build nuclear plant on time and on budget. Look at how the Finns are suffering. Once upon a time they could build properly – but they forgot. I am afraid the UK will just have to burn gas as usual

Bryan McHugh, Sweden

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

An excellent article! I think the most sensible way to ‘reduce emissions’ of CO2, just in case they might pose a problem, is to focus on other means of enhancing production and the quality of life generally. Nuclear power, publicly owned and run on a cost-recovery basis, seems one way to go. Naturally, we would need to use some sort of breeder reactor to minimise the amount of waste produced, as I believe was the original idea.

Robert Verdon, Australia

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

It is a pity that not much is being done in terms of the safe management of nuclear waste. Unless that is done, the public will continue to have little confidence in nuclear power.

SK Mehta, India

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

Thank you so very much for Lyons’ realistic appraisal of a situation that Greenpeace hopes to use to maintain their emotional stranglehold on the world’s energy supply.

I work in the nuclear industry as an engineer and I also write for a pro-nuclear blog called nuclearfissionary.com and I have made it my goal to chip away at the nonsense perpetrated by those ignorant of the science who instead act on fearful impulse.

With more responsible commentary such as Lyons’, we will eventually utilise the power of the atom to solve the world’s energy, economic, environmental and political crisis.

Jack Gamble, USA

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

Lyons is completely wrong about the estimated number of deaths caused by Chernobyl. According to the excellently researched film The Battle of Chernobyl the deaths were purposely underestimated.

It’s also irresponsible to the point of suicidal to imply that ‘a few nuclear accidents’ would be okay. Nuclear power is too big for humans. It should be banned completely, and one day, after the next inevitable and probably far worse disaster, nuclear power will be banned.

It’s too bad that we as a species are so short sighted. Nuclear fallout is essentially forever. We can’t clean it up like oil spills. I say, ban nuclear power, and the sooner the better.

Samscad, Canada

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

I am shocked that Lyons dares to write about something about which he clearly has no idea – Chernobyl. A little research would have shown that the Soviet Union and, up to now, Ukraine, have been hiding the truth about the consequences of the explosion.

I was a child when it happened, but certain things I know as well as everyone else in Ukraine. We had been living in Bila Tzerkva – the ‘fourth zone of Chernobyl’ at that time, so everyone had a radiation overdose.

I left Ukraine at the end of 1999. I had four miscarriages in Ukraine, and one more here in UK in 2000. I did not believe I could ever get through a pregnancy, but since leaving the Ukraine I now have three kids. I don’t think this would have been possible if I had remained in Ukraine.

On average, in our city in 1999, for every 10 pregnancies, there were nine miscarriages – I know this because a close friend works in the hospital’s maternity department. Did Lyons know that almost all the information about Chernobyl including books, the comments of fire fighters, statistics from hospitals about deaths and births, miscarriages, and data about children born with anomalies and abnormalities was all censored!

No one can say how many people died from the Chernobyl radiation as no one has ever tried even to study it. My friend’s mother was sent to that area to work for a few weeks (several months after explosion). After a few weeks, the Soviet government gave her three months family holiday in a good resort and a family flat. My last communication with them was in the late 1990s and she had very serious health problems due to radiation.

Lyons’ claim that Chernobyl was not as ‘scary’ as it was then described is ridiculous.

Olga, UK

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

I have researched Chernobyl extensively – far more than Lyons did for this article judging by some of his pronouncements. I can only say one thing: the article’s sub-heading should read:

‘Much of todays anti-nuclear hysteria is based on a clear understanding of what happened in Ukraine.’

People died, the land was rendered uninhabitable essentially forever. What more needs to be said? Nuclear power is simply too dangerous a technology to use in an unstable world. And in case Lyons hasn’t noticed, our world is pretty unstable right now.

Robert Downing, USA

Letter responding to: Let’s challenge these myths of Chernobyl, by Rob Lyons

You burn tons of coal to refine nuclear power and then you spend the next zillion years trying to find a safe place to hide the leftovers. Truly, the safest way to get rid of nuclear waste is to use it in weapons and that’s no fun.

I’m nothing close to a greenie. I like coal. I like the smell of burnt gasoline in the morning and nothing makes me happier than to cut down a tree that’s in the way. But Nuclear power is a debt our children will never be able to pay.

Bradley, USA

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

Rothschild’s article highlights what I see as an increasing trend, that of legally authorising personal morality.

We’ve seen it in New Zealand with the Waihopai Defence, or claim-of-right, and the same defence was used for power-station tower defacers in the UK. Similarly, the killer of a US surgeon who performed late abortions used it, and Peter Bethune from the Sea Shepherd Marine Conservation Group, currently in a Japanese prison, will be using a variation.

The conservation movement, arising out of a secular world, is generating ethics on the fly. It forms part of what I call neo-animism – the close identification of the moral and spiritual self with mammals, mainly, but extending down taxa to plants, inanimate items especially if natural, concepts, and Planet Earth. Its adversarial identity is formed by anyone advocating destruction or disruption to nature.

Moral mandates will have interesting repercussions, since they challenge existing law or will require, as in this case, creation of new laws. Religions, particularly Islam, are adopting a form of moral mandate by litigious defence of its beliefs where they conflict with the host societies mores. In effect, they are using civil law in defence of canonical law.

Chris Slater, New Zealand

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

The process of succession which enables plants to colonise the Earth works by each wave of species changing their environment. Pioneer species take hold on barren land and their presence changes the environment such that other plants can take over. As the process continues so insects, birds, and animals all have their effect.

If people could live on Earth without affecting their environment they would be unlike anything else that exists. The difference is that people have the option of deciding how to affect it and why.

The ‘how’ and ‘why’ require debate and cooperation.

David Porter, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

Yes, I agree with Rothschild that those who support criminalising ‘ecocide’ are either stupid or deranged and in some cases probably both. Out of the mass of material that makes up the biosphere only humanity has developed awareness and free will. The extreme green campaigners appear to deny this, equating us to some form of virus or cancer infecting the planet. This reached its most ludicrous depths in opposition to nuclear power as a means of overcoming energy shortages and a failure to recognise that every Malthusian doom mongering scenario has failed to materialise. The world will not be saved by sitting around in wigwams breathing vegetarians’ farts, but by human ingenuity.

Anthony John Davis, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

I agree wholeheartedly with spiked taking to task the greens’ anthropomorphic worship of trees and their taking up of the language of the Holocaust. However, I don’t agree with Rothschild’s strident ‘we can do whatever we want to the environment’ stance. It smacks of the beginning of the Old Testament, where God says ‘you can do what you like to everything because I put you in charge’.

Nobody’s in charge. Just because you can do something doesn’t make it a good idea. There needs to be a balanced view that doesn’t start from misanthropic Malthusianism. I agree that the irrational fear of CO2 should be challenged, but that doesn’t make the rest of the package, ie, nasty air pollution, suddenly acceptable. For example the situation in China (and places like Los Angeles, too) is appalling, but the problem is pollution, not CO2. Human activity accounts for at best three per cent of the CO2 produced by processes on this planet. It isn’t even noise. Pollution, on the other hand, is entirely human, and some pollutants are extremely toxic. Although the DDT scare years ago, for example, is now thought to have been based on false assumptions and to have cost millions of lives in Africa, but of course those people are black and far away.

The papers had all kinds of scare stories about air pollution this year being extremely dangerous to asthma sufferers – this is the real issue, pollution and damage rooted in greed and hidden by obsessions with CO2 because it’s nice and easy to deal with. Pollution needs to be dealt with case by case and with fairly draconian checks and powers.

The other thing about CO2 is that, combined with the Malthusian ‘humans are the problem’ mantra is that it lets the political elite off the hook: ‘I’d love to help you but there’s too many of you already’. It lets them coin sympathy while turning their back on the poor – not that they need a lot of help to do that. This is the real problem, as is the industrial use of pesticides in Latin America, and yet hardly anyone it talking about it?

Francis Fish, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

Rothschild doesn’t go far enough. When she says ‘Whatever the usefulness of natural things like flowers, trees and rocks, they are only valuable insofar as they satisfy the needs and wants of human beings whether that involves cutting down trees for wood, picking flowers to decorate our homes, or climbing rocks to enjoy the view…’ it also involves digging up mountains to create endless more roads for us to park our cars on, and cutting down millions of hectares of rainforest to grow soya beans to feed cattle so we can eat burgers at 50p each.

The Marxist notion of ‘value’ may be a useful way to explain the workings of the human economy but it is a mistake to continue to place humanity at the centre of planetary ecology. We need to learn a lot more about the science involved before we assume that valuing everything by its usefulness to human needs and wants is rational.

Simon Wood, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

The theory of man-made global warming is either a terrible mistake or the greatest lie of all time. Unfortunately, all that hysteria about CO2 emissions, melting glaciers, too many people, not enough food, etc. has turned into the new religion of the twenty-first century.

Jose Luiz Belderrain, Brazil

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

The time has come for people to stop and take time to think about what their lives are about.

Control of every aspect of our lives is reaching a level where life is becoming a chore, a drudge, a miserable series of tasks in order to satisfy the demands of our society and our government. On top of that we have the self-opinionated and extreme environmentalists who would stop civilisation in its tracks to satisfy their own selfish ideals.

It’s similar to those smug and selfish people who loudly object to the building of new homes to house an ever growing population, whilst they themselves enjoy the comfort and pleasure of having their own home already established. We must stop treating these blockers of progress as good citizens – they are holding the world to ransom and damaging the ability of individuals to enjoy their lives.

John Carter, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

I am a tree hugger. I love big trees, and the sea, and lakes, and streams of clear water.  I also love Notre Dame, the paintings of Van Gogh and of Velazquez, of da Vinci… They should be taken good care of, being as they are, the birthright of our children, their children, and their children’s children’s children .

But to think that trees, rivers, mountains, cathedrals paintings, or works of art of any kind have rights is absolutely ridiculous.

It is us humans, the ones alive now, and the ones coming after us who have rights. And those rights have to be preserved.

‘Trees have rights’ is pure nonsense.

Maria Maestre, Spain

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

Polly Higgins has an unusual understanding of life but we would be foolish in the extreme to dismiss her as some harmless, over-excited do gooder; those are the most dangerous of the species.

The almost unanimous acclaim Hugo Chavez received from the audience after his anti-capitalist tirade at Copenhagen Climate Summit showed that the man-made global warming consensus isn’t about the science, but about destroying modern Western civilisation.

Higgins’ elevation of the planet to a natural diety is but the prelude to the next step that requires wholesale sacrifice to the Nature Diety, albeit not as brutal as the Mexicans did during the fifteenth century when they despatched some 80,000 prisoners of war to the Morning Star in the hope that the sun would rise again.

What most of us may not have understood is that this global warming agenda isn’t something that the scientists have inadvertently discovered, but a move by the state to solidify its political power.

It is the age old battle between the statists/progressives, and those whom they wish to enslave, we, the freedom loving.

Louis Hissink, Australia

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

The climate has always changed. What’s different about the latest gentle warming since the last ice age? CO2 levels are rising but are still 1000’s of PPM below historic levels when the earth was lush and green. Think of the Jurassic period for an example. CO2 levels are currently dangerously close to the levels at which plants stop growing – about 200 PPM. The Greens should be very concerned about this and encourage increases in CO2.

There is no evidence of anything linking temperature to CO2. Historically CO2 mostly lead temperature changes by about 800 years.

Man-made global warming is a load of nonsense created by government scientists to please their funders, the governments, who see an easy tax take. The man-made global warming theory is like me saying that my father died and was reincarnated as a moon being and lives on the other side of the moon. And, by the way, it’s up to you to prove that I am wrong. Most religions are good at creating this type of argument.

The greens see this as a wonderful opportunity to push stupid agendas that all have unintended consequences. Think biofuel and food shortages, banning DDT and millions of malarial deaths.

Mankind can only pull itself out of the poverty trap through economic development and the only way of doing this is by exploiting the resources available to us. Albeit in a more sustainable way than previously.

James Allison, New Zealand

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

I love trees, especially very big trees, trees too big to hug. I think we should worship them like the ancient Filipinos did. It would certainly be something more humane than the monotheisms. However, only big, inspiring trees should have rights. We would become more godlike by giving them rights.

Robin Sharpe, Canada

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

This ecocide nonsense is the same propaganda and sophistry of the religious. It has nothing to do with anything remotely related to science. I would like to know what drugs these people are on – I want to make sure I avoid them.

If one combines this kind of mythology with the half truths and propaganda from those saviours of themselves, Greenpeace and WWF etc, one gets emotion-driven, publicity-seeking agendas, that divert attention away from real problems that stand a chance of solution and mitigation.

Dennis Nikols, Canada

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

Rothschild’s article is absolutely correct in all particulars. Additionally, I think that anyone should be able to evince any opinion they like without fear of prosecution. We are all offended by different things. I’m not offended by Holocaust denial despite being from Jewish family; I merely think the opinion is misguided (like belief in astrology). I also think that because I deny man-made climate change, and have very good rational reasons for my belief, I should not be persecuted by a lot of hysterical greens.

Orde Solomons, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

I wish to register as a denier of the orthodox view of climate change which places the responsibility for recent temperature changes on anthropogenic carbon dioxide. I do not deny that the climate has changed in the last thirty years – it also changed in the opposite direction in the previous thirty years. It has always changed and always will.

I believe that the warming between 1980 and 2000 that led to the global warming scare was due entirely to natural causes and can be explained by measurements made from satellites. I further believe that serious questions arise about the modelling work made to support the carbon dioxide hypothesis.

I understand that this statement may render me vulnerable to a charge of ecocide.

Tom Addiscott, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

I currently have a Freedom of Information request to Ed Milliband and the Department of Energy and Climate Change asking just what evidence they have that CO2 caused twentieth century warming. Judging by the first response I received they may not even understand that climate change and man-made global warming are not the same thing. I will not give up even though I have low expectations of success.

Colin Russell Brooks, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

I trust that these brave eco-warriors refuse to be vaccinated or to take antibiotics. I also trust that they are campaigning for the rights of malarial parasites, and trypanosomes everywhere, as well as those lovely worms that like to inhabit our guts so much. After all, humans should not intervene in nature, particularly if it involves harming any little creatures. Or is it only the nice, non-harmful things that we should leave alone? Perhaps somehow protecting our health is different from protecting our material well-being? If not, then Jenner and Pasteur and Salk should be first up for Ecocide at the Hague, with that War Criminal Bill Gates shot out of hand for his attempts to eradicate malaria and TB. Ban bleach and soap, smash the sewers, death to the MMR, destroy Rentokil! Or am I missing something?

Tim Hammond, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

The shift from the present profit, possessions and godliness (due to the decline of British capitalism), to a future territoriality, environment and planetary spirituality, is not such a great mental leap, and represents a move back from capitalism to feudalism and from Christian to neo-Christian (pagan, mother nature) beliefs. This is in line with the formation of the holy British Empire; still moralising and war mongering to the rest of the world through its environmental credentials but without the economic or material power of yesteryear.

The influence of religion should not be underestimated. Not only is it the ‘sigh of the oppressed’ but it is also the ‘opium of the people’. Our present-day confusions about illegal drugs and opium in particular, should not lead to a misunderstanding of just how religion influences and effects people. Institutionalised spirituality has many consequences other than the agreed belief in a god. It affects subjectivity by making the self a nebulous, infinite, non-existent entity, separate from actual reality and other people – prone to spectator status, and in more extreme cases, free to do anything to those ‘outside’. Specifically in relation to ecocide, it allows the easy separation of mind and body, theory and practice, and an imagination free of absolutes. Thus the commodification of the planet is separated from the full implications of capitalist value creation, class and subjectivity – and people, in true alienated fashion, are blamed for the problems. The spiritual world is an infinite multiverse of anything, including thinking planets, evil humans, natural (non-human) harmony and beauty, talking trees etc.

The holocaust connection (from genocide to ecocide) is also made with the mass slaughter of chickens, sheep and cows that vegetarians in particular, are so offended by and which could be seen as ecocidal tendencies. While this degrades the real horrors of the holocaust, history should remind us that the established religions of the period did not have a very honourable record and in fact have been implicated in the Nazi atrocities.

These people are on the side of the hegemonic elite, cultivating and mirroring the centralised, top-down, hierarchical structures, of the religious and corporate worlds. Their bizarre ideas should be limited to a personal lifestyle choice but are made potentially dangerous through their adoption by a beleaguered elite who need moral authority. The idea that ecocide has any relation to the other UN categories of crimes against humanity is erroneous, the latter being adopted to stop and control man’s inhumanity to man while ecocide would be complete public and private control outsourced to the planet – the will of the planet and the eco-cabal – making the chains tangible in the form of environmental dictat – the ultimate inhumanity of an inhuman system and a recipe for stagnation and decline – a new dark age.

Malcolm Watts, UK

Letter responding to: Using the Holocaust to silence debate, by Nathalie Rothschild

As with the advocacy of minority rights by the state, the type of policy and law promoted by the greens, cedes more power to the centre. As the direct projection of power has become problematic for government agencies, they have co-opted the victim status of those ‘oppressed’ or marginalised groups to legitimise their power. Now the entire planet falls in to this category, there really is no-where to run. And to be quite cynical; these lawyers may have found the ultimate client: The world and all therein.

Dave Humphrey, UK

Yes! Thank you Brendan O’Neill for writing The ‘taboo’ they just can’t stop talking about, a sensible piece on the resurgence of a neo-Malthusianism which thinks of itself as avant garde!

There is nothing new about rich, supposedly well-meaning white people trying to control the reproductive (and productive) capacities of distant ‘others’. These misplaced ideas about who is responsible for what kind of ‘population problem’ have far-reaching effects upon the lives of people who depend on donor interventions for their health care as I document in my book, Population Policy and Development: From the Policies to the Clinics (2008, Palgrave MacMillan).

Lisa Ann Richey, Denmark

I’m a radical centrist driven to gag on the domination of the media by extremists of both right and left, who see themselves as the only enlightened ones on a planet full of idiots. Both individually, and globally, we people may contribute to the problems we face. But, at the same time only we can find solutions to the problems we face. So thanks must go to Brendan O’Neill for spiking the self-styled elites in The ‘taboo’ they just can’t stop talking about.

And thanks for also pointing out that solving our problems together will take a lot more hard work than that involved in all the seemingly ‘enlightened’ but simplistic solutions out there.

Scott Drendall, USA

In response to The ‘Taboo’ they just can’t stop talking about, by Brendan O’Neill, there is indeed much general agreement that our planet is overpopulated.

Yet, while this is not a taboo subject, there is a real taboo subject, that is, someone like me suggesting that we should actually do something to reduce the population! Even more unacceptable, is actually going so far as to suggest exactly what we ought to do about the problem of overpopulation!

One thing is for sure: it cannot be done quickly because of the existing population growth momentum. All the more reason to start now!

In fact the solutions are pretty simple really. First and foremost, we need better education worldwide, particularly around the notion that the planet is finite; that is, its resources are limited. There is a limit to how many people it can support and for how long it can support that a number and at what standard of living, etc. When you have a child you are responsible for its carbon footprints, too. Secondly, contraception – this is pretty obvious. And thirdly, we must use abortion when necessary.

Birth control is so much kinder than starvation, wars over resources, euthanasia and genocide - isnt it? Which would O’Neill prefer?

I fear that if we don’t cut down on the rate of new arrivals soon we are in grave danger of having to start accelerating some departures – a possibility that becomes ever more real given ever increasing life expectancy due to medical advances, and ever declining natural resources.

Bill Dowling, UK

Thank you Brendan O’Neill for the continuing clarity of thought, reason and common sense, you bring to the population debate in The ‘Taboo’ they just can’t stop talking about. It’s a stance I fully support

Even the UN admits that world population is likely to start to fall sometime after 2050. That so many people are fearful and negative about the future depresses me. All one can do is feel for those who spend so much of their lives in such a negative and fearful state.

Mark Rassie, New Zealand

As Brendan O’Neill notes in The ‘Taboo’ they just can’t stop talking about, overpopulation may now be mentioned a lot in newspapers. But it was not mentioned in any of the drafts for a binding resolution on the mitigation of climate change at COP15 in Copenhagen, nor has it been mentioned in recent years generally. It is unmentionable in international governmental fora.

The NGOs say overpopulation is no worse than overconsumption in the West. They are wrong because the rest of the world struggles to achieve the same levels of overconsumption.

Frede Vestergaard, Denmark

The ‘Taboo’ they just can’t stop talking about, by Brendan O’Neill, was all very well, but he hasn’t exactly made an argument for why this neo-Malthusianism is wrong.

Still, the demolition of the ‘taboo’ argument is very funny, so I’m prepared to wait till later in the debate for the full answer

Patrick Neylan, UK

Brendan O’Neill’s article, The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century?, hints at an interesting parallel.

From the beginning of civilization, man has divined explanations for the brutality of the natural world around him such as the mythology of gods punishing him for wrongdoing. The remedy according to the mythology is for man to make a sacrifice to appease the offended god.

Climate science is modern mythology. An elaborate story is constructed to explain how we have offended the gods (we drive cars, etc) and the remedy is to make a sacrifice (eg, a carbon tax).

We have such an innate need to explain the world around us that we invent stories. And we are comforted by the idea that humans are to blame because if we are not, then we really have no control over the brutal natural world.

Ken Rohleder, USA

In response to Ben Pile’s article Let’s pick apart this politics of doom, the problem that scientists sceptical of man-made climate change have is that when they want to point out the errors in the theory there is a lack of data. Man-made climate change advocates won’t release it! In fact, I’m not sure that in many cases there is any real data – only computer models with adjusted parameters like the infamous ‘Hockey Stick’ which should never have gone unchallenged for so long.

I’m thankful for the recent snowstorms which have shut down Washington DC. Of course, they don’t show the earth is cooling but they may make politicians think that global warming is not such as bad thing.

Ross Firestone, USA

It’s worth remembering that the peoples of the Himalayan catchment area would be in real trouble if the ice ever stopped melting.

Doug Landau, UK

Let’s pick apart this politics of doom, by Ben Pile was a great article. However, we should not forget the sheer vanity of the politicians and warming activists involved.

Such people simply cannot comprehend the simple fact that the planet has existed for billions of years, it has had a changing climate for hundreds of millions of years and that the climate will continue to change for hundreds of millions of years to come. Activists and politicians have convinced themselves that we humans, we puny creatures, are actually killing the planet!

But, hey wait a minute, planet Earth is so lucky to have all these Earth-loving activists here right now to save the planet from destruction. Just imagine how dreadful it would be if these bright-eyed activists were not available to save the planet?

It is vanity that prevents people from comprehending that Earth will continue to warm and cool for hundreds of millions of years to come long after all these activists are dust.

David Peters, UK

The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century?, by Brendan O’Neill was excellent.

Since late last year when news of Climategate emerged, I have been following the story and educating myself on the science (or lack thereof). I am amazed at the dearth of American media attention paid to this fascinating topic. Let’s face it, whether pro or con, activist or sceptic, this is a great story. As it evolves, we see that the man-made climate change thesis has more in common with religion than science.

The science part is quite straightforward: thermometer data, a hypothesis that more CO2 will create a greenhouse effect, and computer modelling to make rational predictions. Well, it seems the thermometer data is incomplete and uncertain at best and manipulated, falsified, and destroyed at worst; CO2 as a greenhouse heat-engine most likely overstated; and the computer models amazingly produce whatever result you already believe in; and once the code was made public by the Climategate email releases and reviewed by truly independent experts, these models were shown to be a hash as well. Some science.

This has been the most amazing thing I have seen in my life – a kind of merciless, godless religion entirely supported by academia, government, and Media. Although I certainly do not maintain some sort of conspiracy was afoot – more likely opportunists and stupidity at work - the whole affair does give one pause. There are real problems in the world right now - problems we could have solved had we put a fraction of the resources and brainpower sucked up by man-made global warming, from malaria, AIDS, to hunger, and Poverty.

Gregory Olsen, USA

In response to Ben Pile’s Let’s pick apart this politics of doom, I think a little investigation would find that the ‘save the planet, think of the children’ crowd is mostly confined to the middle classes of the developed world. These people, like most politicians, are scientifically illiterate and unfortunately tend to get all their information from the popular media which thrives on armageddon scenarios. All the articles in the ‘Nothing to worry about’ tray tend to end up in the trash basket.

We tend to see all scientists as versions of Stephen Hawking, but there are quite a few who are not brilliant, know very little outside their own field, and whose only chance of fame is to publish. In the last 30 years any of these with a theory vaguely supporting the climate change consensus has found it relatively easy to get government research funding in any Western country which has committed itself to controlling the climate. It would be interesting to know how many of them are just going along for the ride because it pays the rent. Either way, you get a bias. Scientists who think and say that it’s all a bit silly don’t stand much of a chance.

When you think about it, the phrase ‘Stopping Climate Change’ is complete nonsense. The climate, very basically, is 51trillion cubic kilometres of wildly gyrating gases of uncertain composition reacting to a large but uncertain number of barely understood variables. To control it we first have to find out how it works and a little research on both sides of the debate will show that we don’t. What we do know is available to anyone with a little time and patience and will make it quite obvious that ‘hottest day/month/year on record’ is just twaddle and notions like the ‘Average Annual Global Temperature’ are about as useful as ‘Average Length of A Stick’ There is no sound evidence that the world or the climate is doing anything other than what it’s always done; that is, what it wants.

Keith Gale, Australia

If Hands off the human footprint, by Brendan O’Neill, is any indication this is a debate for debate’s sake.

O’Neill reads like a bible-belt preacher rubbishing Darwin. There is one constructive suggestion, namely, make energy part of the solution, not the problem, but other than that I’m amazed at the quality of the piece. This is just a diatribe against the climate doom-sayers, and while the science could be open to questioning, the urgency of the problem shouldn’t be. While O’Neill may want to risk following the dinosaurs, I hope most people aren’t.

K Gopal Rao, India

In response to Ben Pile’s Let’s pick apart this politics of doom, I have to ask, what’s new? Politics is the art of getting things done. If you believe that climate change requires more action than dinner-table talk you are bound to become politically engaged. And it isn’t pretty. Politicians that maintain a high moral tone and fine principles are just trampled underfoot, or ignored.

So it’s hardly a revelation that people like Ed Milliband are using specious arguments, and bringing in irrelevancies like poverty and so forth.

But what about the sceptics like Pile himself? They are just as political. They don’t seem to care about truth or facts either. They treat the matter like the defence in a court case, where the idea is to create a climate of doubt rather than present anything coherent.

Personally, every time I read an article like Pile’s I feel that the climate change lobby must be on the right track. If the sceptics had a coherent argument on their side, surely they’d present it rather than just rant on about the unfair tactics of the other side?

Matthew Green, UK

Despite the fact that there is an abundance of cookery programmes on TV and cookbooks are regularly at the top of the bestsellers charts, there seems to be less and less space now to appreciate food purely as enjoyment, as a question of taste understood in an entirely non-judgmental way. There’s also no escape from the issue of food even for those who have little interest in it beyond providing fuel for life.

In the parent/child discussion generally, modern morality and anxiety takes two predominant forms. One is the way in which there is a constant pressure on individuals to be ‘good parents’ and the second is a policy outlook that regards social problems and solutions as happening at an individual, behavioural level. As a result, parents are viewed both as a problem and as a potential solution. The state is thus constantly striving to interfere in what should be a private institution, with the question of healthy eating being one of the most important elements of that intervention.

Parents tend to internalise a wider social sentiment that they are not to be trusted with bringing up children as they see fit, but should always bow to the rules laid down by experts. The use of food as a weapon begins when a woman gets pregnant. Suddenly any rational relationship to food and drink goes out the window because the weight of moral indignation kicks in. A woman ceases to be an autonomous adult and is reduced to the role of incubator, where all her actions are viewed in terms of how they might harm the child.

The debate about drinking alcohol while pregnant is a great example of this. Empirical studies show that women drinking moderately during pregnancy have, on average, healthier children. To a degree, this really boils down to class, not alcohol intake (middle-class women still enjoy a glass of wine quite regularly while pregnant). But the official guidelines now say that you should not drink alcohol at all when pregnant. It is a moral imperative, not a scientific one. It is a demand that you should subsume any of your adult pleasures to the needs of your child. Pregnant women have been refused alcohol by publicans when they have tried to order a drink at a bar. If a woman dares to order a glass of wine in a social setting now, she will always excuse herself publicly to those around her.

During the woman’s pregnancy, and on the very day of the birth of her child, the next intervention will be on the subject of breast feeding. In a society that trusted people and trusted science it could be seen that in the developed world whether a child is breast fed or bottle fed has no impact on the health of the child. Children are healthier than ever before and life expectancy is at unprecedented levels. Sadly, we don’t get a sensible, pragmatic view of the pros and cons of infant feeding. Instead, medical authorities hold an absolutist view: breast is best. No ante-natal class or midwife will discuss formula feeding. To formula feed is to be a bad mother and risk comprising the outcomes for your child. In reality, over 90 per cent of mothers will stop exclusively breast feeding in the first two weeks of their child’s life, but the guilt and the internalisation of the moral category of good/bad mother still lives on.

And this obsession with the way food morally defines you as a parent continues through weaning: the good mother cooks all her own food and spends hours putting it in little freezer containers while the bad mother buys mass-produced pots of baby food; the good mother gives raisins to her kids as snacks, but the bad mother gives them a packet of crisps; and so on. The list is endless and the anxiety about food in every home with children is palpable. Brought up in such an atmosphere, there is little prospect of children growing up to understand food as something simply to be enjoyed as fuel for life or as a source of pleasure.

Once children go to school, food really does become an explicit way of society showing that it does not believe that parents are to be trusted. The message is that parents are so blinded by their affection that they have no ability to know what is best for their child. That’s the generous view; many experts, teachers and health professionals view parents as plain stupid.

There are numerous examples of how food is used to create an acceptance of state intervention into the family. One of the strongest expressions of the distaste the authorities have for parents is the promoting of the irrational panic about obese children. This is transmitted, for example, through the routine weighing of children in schools, with the sanction that letters will be sent to parents telling them that their children are obese and advising them on what they should feed their children. The obesity epidemic is largely a myth. But the reality of the situation is not the point. The childhood obesity panic has become a physical metaphor, expressing the belief that parents cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of their children and that others know best.

Lunch boxes are regularly checked and notes are sent to parents to scold them about the contents of the packed lunch. Programmes for free school meals are rolled out not with the objective to give kids a more enjoyable meal but to expressly test whether children will change their parents’ food habits. In primary school, every lesson has some aspect of moralising about food; science in primary schools is almost entirely about healthy eating. The aim is to indoctrinate the child and create a climate where it is perfectly legitimate for children to question their parents’ ability to feed them properly.

And so food has stopped being food - something you can take or leave, something that is a private activity - and has become a means of proving one’s moral worth. The future of food for those coming through the school system today may not be a happy one.

Jane Sandeman is convenor of the Institute of Ideas Parents’ Forum.

Our products are sold through a variety of channels: we’re in nearly almost all major supermarkets now, but we also deal with a lot of independent retailers and with some of the national food service operators. We also sell through a mail-order partner and export a little to Europe, too. So, while we are a specialist producer dealing with many small shops, we also produce on a big enough scale to satisfy the major chains, too.

As ever, the future of food manufacturing - indeed, of every aspect of the food business - is going to be about the survival of the fittest. We started as an independent butcher, but had we remained as one we may not have been in business now. We made the decision to really focus on what we were good at and concentrate on where the margins were: manufacturing.

If we had continued simply as a specialist butcher, and if we had survived BSE in the early 1990s, we would probably have gone into being an organic butcher or something very specialist and very well thought-out for our market. But such a move would have hurt a lot financially and I don’t think we would be achieving anything like the results we are now. How to take a business forward depends on your aspirations. If you want to keep your business simple and not be ambitious, then stand still and do the minimum. But we weren’t confident that that was going to be enough for us, so we gave up on producing red meat and gave up retailing, too. Now we focus on manufacturing and we sell to retailers, but that was a very big mind shift.

Now we call ourselves the haggis specialists, so we make basically three products: traditional haggis, vegetarian haggis (which we invented over 25 years ago) and one recipe of black pudding.

We manufacture a high-quality product, yet many people are sniffy about the idea of ‘processed food’. In some ways, that reaction is understandable. Consumers are given a lot of conflicting messages about food, what’s good and bad: eat low-fat, low-sugar, low-salt; avoid processed meat; cook everything from scratch. But one thing that the scaling up of food production has done - good or bad - is that it has made food a lot cheaper and consumers want it cheap, too.

In other words, food producers are faced with a very demanding audience. Manufacturers can offer them a quality, processed product. On the other hand, if consumers are willing to spend more and they want to know a lot about the provenance and integrity of the product and it’s heritage, that option is available, too.

In that regard, one of the industries I think that’s going to be quite interesting to watch is eggs. A lot of supermarkets are under a lot of pressure from consumers not to have any caged eggs for sale. So Waitrose, for example, now sells ‘no caged eggs’ and all their own products contain free-range eggs as well. If Waitrose was one of your major customers and you produced caged-hen eggs well you’d be a bit stuffed. You can see that the area in a supermarket allocated to caged-hen eggs is getting squeezed by the kind of natural, more homely, cosy eggs. As an egg producer, you then need to make a business decision about switching to less intensive production methods, which is a bit of a gamble. Should producers find another market for caged eggs, or diversify and hope that the extra business will justify the investment? That’s not an easy question to answer.

Another tough question for producers is how to deal with the big supermarkets. We had to think quite a lot about that ourselves because when we first started out wholesaling haggis it was entirely to the independent market; we weren’t even talking to supermarkets and they didn’t really know about us. Some producers take a very independent view that makes something of a mission out of not dealing with the big chains. I think that that’s a very brave model and if you’ve got a product that can be supported in that way and you’ve got enough customers then you’ll be fine.

However, we realised that a lot of our customer base of independent shops was in decline or at best standing still. We were trying to grow our business and look at future success, so we knew that focusing on independent shops wasn’t going to work long-term. By then, our reputation for making good haggis had reached such a high that we were in the privileged position of supermarkets approaching us. I think if you can achieve that then you can decide who’s right for you, name your price and look after your profit margins. If you’re serious about sharing your product with consumers then you need to be available in the places where the majority of food sales - 80 per cent, I think - are made.

That said, I still think there’s an important role for shops, they just need to be canny about what they’re doing and, where possible, add value to their own business in-house, for example by making their own sandwiches and other products - something that supermarkets really can’t replicate as easily - while providing a friendlier, more personal service.

Equally, producers need to stay on their toes and look out for new product opportunities. For example, it still raises a lot of controversy, but our vegetarian haggis has gone from zero to around 20 per cent of our production. People are now much more open to vegetarian food than in the past. On the other hand, a lot of foodies just discount the idea of it not because they don’t like the idea of eating something wholesome or anything, but because they see the ‘real McCoy’ haggis is the meat version. If nothing else, the vegetarian version is great with meat as a stuffing!

The food market is so diverse now that it’s very hard to make a big impact with a new product. Just as we’ve gone from four television channels to hundreds, so tastes vary hugely, too. For example, the focus groups that we ran in London and Glasgow highlighted huge differences in consumers of our product. In London, there was a lot more reticence about anything that you microwaved; everything had to be fresh and natural with more cooking from scratch. Yet at the same time, there was more concern about time pressures. In Glasgow, there was much more receptiveness to microwaved foods.

There’s a contradiction at work here. Ready meals are less fashionable in many ways than they were before and there’s a lot of support, especially amongst middle-class consumers, for organic food, recycling, growing your own veg, ‘healthy choices’ and cooking everything from scratch at home. And yet, I suspect there’s still quite a bit of growth to come in the convenience food and ready-meal market, too.

It’s fascinating what goes on with food, it’s becoming more and more political and everyone’s got opinions on it. The challenge for everyone in the business is to try to keep up.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Jo Macsween is co-director of Macsween.

I have never been particularly impressed by the idea of the precautionary principle’. It smacks of ‘We don’t really understand the situation but, as an act of faith, we recommend this particular course of action’.

It is little better than throwing sandwiches out of the train windows at Brookwood to scare the Elephants away. And since there are no elephants at Brookwood, therefore it must have worked.

More seriously, pre-emptive actions might actually make things worse. There have been a number of sci-fi stories based on the idea that the ice-age predictions of the 1970s were in fact correct and that it was only greenhouse gasses that were preventing it. Cutting greenhouse gasses might therefore result in the world being plunged into a new ice age – which would be a far more serious climate disaster than any amount of warming.

In the real world, it has been pointed out many times on spiked that the economic and social consequences of cutting carbon emissions will blight (to a greater or lesser extent) just about everybody on the planet – except for the various vested interests no doubt.

Paul Howd, UK

Let’s pick apart this politics of doom, by Ben Pile, was one of the most astute commentaries yet to appear on this topic. Sadly the government is so far up the AGW path that retreat is not an option and the main political alternative, the Conservative party, appears to be equally convinced of the malaise.

The only way out for the politicians would be to have the man-made climate change hypothesis thrown under the bus by an external force, thereby allowing its advocates to retire with dignity. Unfortunately that seems unlikely. I think confusion must reign for a while yet.

John Catley, UK

Let’s pick apart this politics of doom, by Ben Pile, was an excellent piece.

I’m by no means a glaciologist, but I do remember being told at school that glaciers were ‘frozen rivers’, so presumably the water would still be there however warm it got (hence Pile’s comment about dams, I realise). I’d love to ask Miliband (and Cameron and all the other politicians hitched to the AGW bandwagon) what proportion of the atmosphere he thinks is CO2. I bet he doesn’t know.

Keep up the good work. It’s sobering to think that without the efforts of a handful of bloggers like McIntyre, Watts and Pile (not to mention whoever leaked the CRU emails) dissenting arguments would still be utterly ignored by the government, the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media.

James Pickett, UK

Reading Ben Pile’s Let’s pick apart this politics of doom, it occurred to me that the story of power through crises is a long and often repeated one. I had up close and very personal experience with it early in my professional career as a software developer in industry.

I had obtained a position in a west coast instrumentation company in the early 1970s. I was baffled by a pattern of the company repeatedly experiencing problems followed by a rallying of the troops, getting excited, and hammering the problem with the same ‘solutions’ time after time after time. The problem was never really solved but the excitement and repeated hammering always occurred.

I concluded that the pattern was an intentional management tactic. Apparently, this was because management did not have a clue how to organise and motivate the line workers without crises. It was as if to manage, they needed crises to organise, motivate, and focus everyone’s efforts.

As a test, I provided a simple but effective solution to one of their standard problems. They implemented the solution and it worked spectacularly well. So much so that they could disconnect all of their standard ‘solutions’ and the problem no longer existed. Interestingly, rather than elation and satisfaction that a decade-old problem had vanished, they became despondent, disorganised, and appeared to feel I had done them great harm.

Since then, as a technical consultant, I have observed that this style of management is frequently used in industry and government.

Lionell Griffith, USA

UK secretary of state for energy and climate change, Ed Miliband, appears to concede that the world is not guaranteed to end in fire and ice if we do nothing about CO2 emissions. If he’s serious about the precautionary principle, then surely he should weigh this possibility against the cast-iron certainty that the policies he is recommending will do untold damage to our economic and industrial development.

Russell Taylor, UK

In an otherwise excellent article, (The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century) Brendan O’Neill resorts to a somewhat confusing formulation when he says that ‘science is simply information… but information is not truth’.

The natural sciences provide us with provisional working models of the inanimate natural world, and in this respect it seems to me that they do a pretty good job of establishing truth. The problem arises when this impedes or is confused with the related but separate endeavour of establishing truth about the animate world, the world of human affairs. In the natural world we can establish reliable truth from our circumstances, whereas in the human world we can and should enjoy the latitude of establishing truth through our circumstances, because these circumstances can be changed by us. The Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov made a useful distinction between these two different ways of establishing truth, labelling them the ‘logical’ and ‘historical’ methods of inquiry.

The ‘climate’ as currently conceived is a category conflating several different aspects of the world, some of which are susceptible to logical inquiry and some of which are susceptible to historical inquiry. Anti-human trends that have been documented exhaustively on spiked mean that our current thinking constantly seeks to eliminate, or else is completely blind to, the freedom for human deliberation that can and should exist in relation to the climate. O’Neill is therefore correct to say that a key problem with debate and policy around climate change is an inability to grasp the rightful place of science and politics in human affairs. But just because the relationship of science to truth has been misconceived doesn’t mean that science has no relationship to truth, much less that science deserves to be denigrated.

Sandy Starr, UK

I think in The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century, Brendan O’Neill is getting carried away a bit. The problem with the IPCC is that it has been taken over by Greens and, consequently, has been heavily politicised.

If the science were good, we would really have something to worry about and would need to do something to avoid serious problems in the future. To give a different example, if all the astronomers confirmed that a large asteroid were to hit Earth the week after next, it would concentrate debate on the best way of dealing with it and fast, and everything else (ideologies, morality) would fall by the wayside.

It is not a matter of ‘sanctifying’ science, but getting reliable and accurate information about the world around which all the other considerations have to revolve. If we were all to die within a fortnight, who cares about ideologies?

If all the rubbish science can be removed from the IPCC (still a long way to go) and we discover that there may be a problem in the very long term but we can’t really tell, then it will take its place alongside other investigations of the world (geology, medicine, etc) without any politician manipulating the inquiry according to his agenda. We need to understand the world we live in, but we need to do so reliably.

Stephen W Beuer, UK

Brendan O’Neill is really too kind in The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century. Having followed the man-made climate change hypothesis closely for the last few years it has become apparent that the problem is rather worse than he suggests.

While the political aspects match his analysis well, it is the deplorable quality of IPCC science, the lack of curiosity at the detail level and the absence of rigour that illustrate some of the less desirable aspects of modern (and historical) academic society.

The main problem with the IPCC science is that it is simply mistaken. Central to the whole argument is an assumption that a planet’s temperature depends on its albedo. Counter intuitive it may be but the assumption is false – this falsity was etablished by Gustav Kirchhoff nearly 150 years ago.

Similarly, analysing the greenhouse effect using the IPCC favoured energy balance model, ie, counting W/m^2 has no validity. It purports to represent heat flow; unfortunately natural heat flow is from hot to cold, a fact bizarrely omitted at crucial points in IPCC reports.

To be fair it was the progenitors of the IPCC who picked up on some rather odd scientific endeavours from the past, such as Fourier, Arrhenius and Callendar, to set the IPCC on its current course. One weakness of the IPCC is that it has no mechanism to check its fundamental premises.

The IPCC sources are unsatisfactory because they are rooted in the past and fail to take into account many relevant contemporary developments – the examples above are but two.

Currently the IPCC is under attack for fiddling the measurements and manufacturing projections. But no amount of Mea Culpa and promises to do better will eliminate fundamental flaws in the original hypothesis.

Dermod O’Reilly, Belgium

‘Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity’ – Albert Einstein. So sorry, science really does trump politics, despite what Brendan O’Neill argues in The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century.

Disagreement with science isn’t immoral. Denying the theory of evolution or quantum physics isn’t immoral. It’s simply idiotic, and you do indeed ignore the theory of gravity at your own peril. One of the beautiful things about science, unlike politics, is that anecdotal evidence and rhetoric are worthless. Claims require support and evidence, not melodramatic exaggerations and cheap sound bites.

What organisations have recently released conclusions that the IPCC is seriously dodgy? Greenpeace? The National Academy of Sciences? The American Institute of Physics? The European Academy of Sciences and Arts? Anyone with more than a dozen papers on climate (you have literally thousands of scientists to choose from)? Did O’Neill do a survey of scientific reporting on climate in the last ten years to support his claim that the false glacier claim was ‘one of the most widely cited pieces of climate-change evidence amongst both green-leaning journalists and world leaders’? Or did he make it up on the spot because it sounded true and he couldn’t be bothered to check?

spiked has long taken an intellectually bankrupt policy on reporting climate science. It’s not about whether the science is ‘airtight or flimsy’? spiked seems to continually, repeatedly, and deliberately conflate the normative statements of environmental activists and politicians with the positive statements of scientific publications. This is akin to dismissing Darwin’s theories of evolution because social Darwinism is a ridiculous theory.

As for the hysterical greens and moralising politicians, feel free to say whatever you like about them. Challenging them in the field of policy is your job. Making claims that are scientific in substance rather than political without anything more than a pithy dismissals or rhetorical flourishes is where it starts to go wrong.

Joseph Chu, USA

It’s refreshing to see an admission by Brendan O’Neill in The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century that the debate was never really about the state of the situation, causation, and solutions, it was actually a much older (and over-rehearsed) debate on the nature of science, evidence and empiricism. Apparently this science thing (that’s evidence-based thinking to you and me) has gotten way too big for it’s boots: ‘Science is simply information, which can be useful and enlightening, of course it can, but information is not truth.’

Aha, so it’s truth we need, and science can’t give us that, no Sir. So what do we do? Rather than basing decision making on evidence about the world, we should base politics on something else, like an ideology (homoeopathy, agrarian Marxism, ‘Ferraris for all’?). I can hear Jacques Derrida and fellow postmodernists cheering from the grave. And the best thing about not having to worry about science? Everyone can continue to do anything they like. After all, there’s not much point worrying about the icecaps if you can’t even prove they exist in the first place!

Sam Gordon, France

Brendan O’Neill writes in The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century that ‘the ultimate scandal… is the idea that scientific fact, which is fundamentally just information, should determine how society is organised’.

I have to completely disagree. If decisions about the management of society are not to be influenced by information, on what basis should they taken?

The issue should be whether what is proclaimed as scientific fact is any such thing. What has happened is that government has given unlimited money to a very small and atypical group calling themselves ‘climate scientists’ but whose science has been as untested as astrological science. Then spin doctors, government-funded organisations like the Royal Society, government appointees and the journalistic profession announced this as The Science of 99.9 per cent of scientists.

I have asked journalists, politicians and alarmist lobbyists now totalling in the thousands to name two prominent scientists, not funded by government or an alarmist lobby who have said that what we are seeing is a catastrophic degree of warming and none of them have yet been able to do so. As O’Neill says, science is just information. The ultimate scandal is that we have been lied to by government. And real science has been usurped by ‘environmentalists who know their moral crusade for Luddism would never be supported on its own merits’.

Neil Craig, UK

‘The problem with the IPCC is not that some of its science is dodgy, but the fact that it elevates science per se above politics and democracy’ (The IPCC: a Vatican for the twenty-first century)

This is completely back-to-front. The problem is that the IPCC – a political body devoted to promoting higher taxes and world governance – has subordinated science to politics, ie, produced fraudulent, biased science calculated to serve its political objectives.

Peter Kidson, UK

What is becoming truly worrying here is not whether or not the climate is warming, but the way in which climate change fundamentalists preach their message. They bring to mind American evangelical preachers. ‘Your role is to believe what I tell you, not to think yourself’, they imply.

Europe, which has largely lost touch with a personal god, has turned to animism and made climate change-ism its new quasi-scientific religion.

Karl Reinikainen, UK

On the whole, Rob Lyons’ When will the IPCC melt away? is quite a good article – far better than has been available in the mainstream media for years, and certainly better than anything yet published in the American media.

However, as always, it has the typical spiked flaw. Nothing is ever as ‘they’ think it is. spiked is always here to tell us what the REAL problem is….

In fact, the right wingers in the United States are very much correct – as much as it would pain spiked writers to admit it. The reasonable, conservative science on CO2 and climate change is quite good.

The apocalyptic predictions that have accompanied climate science, however, are execrable. And those most attracted to such apocalyptic musings follow an anti-capitalist, anti-industrial ideology that long pre-dates any talk of global warming.

The attempt by Lyons to balance off the leftist-green ideologues with right-wing businessmen is an embarrassing error. Those corporate leaders are rent-seekers, not convinced believers. Think about it: the very first corporation to sign on to cap and trade was Enron.

Mark Bulger, USA

Rob Lyon’s When will the IPCC melt away? reads as a well-balanced piece and makes valid points.

One difficulty in this and related affairs is confusion in mainly middle-class minds about what it means to be ‘green’. Concern over environmental matters is one thing, but subscribing in ignorance to what are so often subversive activities and data manipulations is another. When faced with the reality of some green activities the comfortable middle classes soon react with dismay, but then feel at a loss as to where to go from there.

I have the impression a similar reaction is becoming more widespread in the face of the recent revelations about climate change. A more effective instrument for analysing climate change than the IPCC would be welcomed.

After Copenhagen, the politicians have both a dilemma and an opportunity to change tack, but hubris will prevent many from taking advantage of it.

Bryn Thomas, Australia

Rob Lyons writes that ‘two things now exist in parallel: the real, open, provisional and tentative science of climate change ... and The Science, a closed, certain, often fantastical set of conclusions based on moralism and politics…’

The situation’s worse than that. For some time now scientists have been unable to do real, open and tentative science in the climate field if they want to keep their grant. ‘The Science’ has closed down all discussion and balance.

Only one thing now lives in climate science – propaganda. High finance has moved into the Cap and Trade industry, and is only interested in findings that justify the flow of ‘carbon credits’.

Chris Baxter, UK

Rob Lyons writes, ‘that’s not to say the world isn’t getting warmer’. Actually, the world isn’t getting warmer at the moment and hasn’t been since 1998. Look at the Hadley data for mean global temperature: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcrut3.html

And there are quite a few good reasons for thinking it’s going to get colder.

Tom Addiscott, UK

I fully concur with ‘Hands off the human footprint!’ I’ve been trying to drive a very similar line of reasoning on my blog for several years. And 40 years ago, I was driven up the wall by the cataclysmic ‘reasoning’ of Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown and the Club of Rome.

I harboured absolutely no doubt about Copenhagen’s results; it was doomed from the start, and this I knew because I have been working extensively with people in India and China. They were not about to throw development into the dustbin.

If global warming is a real phenomenon – and I’m pretty convinced that it is – and if it’s really anthropogenic – which is probable – then we have to find a way to both live well and manage the climate. It’s possible. But listening to wannabe Cassandras is just not an option

Chanteur Du Charme, Belgium

‘Hands off the Human Footprint!’ What a refreshing (climate) change to read instead of the battery of ‘carbon chipped’ , zealous acolytes claiming expertise to impose propaganda, ideology and costs upon the general population. The swingback to a rational approach to humankind’s walk through life is long overdue.

How did the green fanaticism manage to get such a grip? It crept up through the 2000s until we seemed to have a one dimensional approach to carbon from every person in authority, from politicians and scientists to CEOs. Was it the years of boom and the hollowness of ever increasing profit that caused this new search for moral meaning?

I have tried to listen to those advocating a green agenda. I even attended a talk by the then chief scientific adviser to the Government, David King, about three years ago, only to see that even he had ‘exaggerated the presentation graph’ in the history of carbon dioxide to accelerate the curve in the twenieth century!

Why on an island built on coal are we not at the forefront of research and development into burning clean coal for our much needed power supply ? Instead we import expensive gas, charge people extortionate prices to keep warm while our experts tell us nuclear power is good for us.

Keith Brookes, UK