George Monbiot and The Case of the Excluded Muddle ... Monbiot's Calculus
Stef at Famous for 15 Megapixels rails against wannabe polymath and Renaissance man, environmental guru and The Guradian readers substitute for Chomsky and original thought Georgy Monbiot...."The Thoughts of Charmin' George"
For a recent birthday I was kindly given, by someone I love, a copy of his portentously entitled "Heat" - How to stop the Planet Burning" - which should really initiate a new fashion for book burning. The word portentously is used with purpose. GM is a portent, and he also reflects the shifting logic, the impenetrable statistical manipulations (quite how do you accurately calculate the Mean UK temperature in the UK / World in 1900 / 1950 / 2007 ? and make valid comparisons ?) and shock / horror claptrap of the pseudo academic mind , who seeing a badwagon cannot resist the temptation to jump aboard - if only for the ride.
Leibniz (amongst others) gave us Calculus which those who got into the Science Sixth grappled with , it is as nothing compared with Monbiot's Calculus - the mathematics of the indefinite - whose operations have eluded many but ...well ...
It works like this.
Take a number. Any number. Make it bigger. Here are some examples from his ...there are many more.
Page 6
"The IPCC ...estimated in 2001 that global temperatures will rise between 1.4 and 5.8 this century (Centigrade)....
...one study published in 2005 suggests that the maximum possible temperature rise .. caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide ....is 11.5 (Centigrade) .. an increase as big as this ...is very unlikely .." ( but read on ...)
Pages 12 /13
"I have concentrated on the effects of the...IPCC range of 1.4 -5.8 (Centigrade) ....some climate scientists maintain ... this could rise much further."
Paul Crutzen (Nobel Laureate) ... falling levels of particles ....temperature could rise by between 7 and 10 (Centigrade).
In 2005 British scientists ... computer simulation large and more detailed ....ranging anywhere between 1.9 and 11.5 (Centigrade)
Page 158
" ... UK consumes 37.8 Mn tonnes of petroleum products a year. The most productive oil crop in UK is rape ......yoeld is 3 - 3.5 tonnes per hectare ....One tonne = 415 kilos biodiesel so 1 hecatre produces 1.45 tonnes of road fuel and so.... we need 25.9 Mn Hectares ...but the UK has only 5.7 Mn hectares of cropland ! WOW!
Page 6
"The global sea level has been rising by 2mm a year"
Page 8
" ..and sea levels increase by 40 centimetres (roughly in the middle of expected range)... the number of people in danger from storm surges grows from 75 Mn to 200 Mn..."
Page 9
" researchers (on 5 continents) .. found that if temperatures rise to about the middle of the expected range (would that be by IPCC, Paul Criu zen or British Statisticians?) 15-37 % of the world's species will cease to exist by 2050 ... 1.5 degrees and Indian Ocean corals become extinct .... 2.0 degrees and 97% are likely to die"
Page 159 (if you can get this far)
"In Sumatra and Borneo...4 Mn hectares of forest ...converted to palm farms...6 Mn is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia ...16.5 Mn in Indonesia .... orang - utan extinct etc., etc.,"
There is a sneaking suspicion that Georgie Porgie has been involved in calculating the cost of the London Olympics.
I leave Georgy's penetrating apercus on 9/11 conspiracies, evidence of state terrism, to Stef to deal with ..."Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public scepticism." .. which must explain the worthy objectives of all those sceptical Democrats, anxious to install a truly Jeffersonian participatory Democracy in Iraq, shooting, bombing, torturing, raping, murdering, kidnapping their fellow citizens.
Monbiot's Calculus - the mathematics of the indefinite - one of the more arcane branches of Indecision Theory.
2 comments:
I have two questions. First, how is George's last name pronounced? Is it pronounced the French way: Mon bee-oh, as in body odor? Or is just Mon by-ot?
My other question concerns the newspaper GM writes for. Is the Guradian, as some writers have it, or is it, as others have suggested, either the Gurudian or the Gruniard?
Monbiot is, I understand pronounced as you say, ze french way..Mon - bee - Oh - at least that is what the BBC use.
Stef it appears, prefers TWAT.
The newpapers is correctly the Manchester Guardian, which changed its location to London and its name to The Guardian, and due to the simultaneous change in technology - ie, the paper was no longer written long hand by armies of scribes but used typesetting machines acheiving thereby hitherto undreamt of levels of typographical mistakes. This fabled incompetence which achieved it's apogee with the mis-spelling of it's own name (this may be apocryphal) and older readers ( and those who feel the rot set in with the change of location) still choose an alternative spelling to show how smart they are - Lord Patel prefers and always uses Guradian, .... tastes vary.
This is an example of British / English schoolboy humour.
The Daily/Sunday Telegraph receives the same treatment to reflect the mildly right wing bias of the organ (generally somewhere to the far right of Attila) and Torygraph is used.
Actually a good paper with excellent sports pages and invariably the most detailed reports of rape and sexual assault on their infamous Page 3 , such that they must have some sort of record of using words to describe those anatomical features peculiar to the female body, beating even the readers letters pages of Hustler ... apparently.
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