Sunday 4 May 2014

Climate change: why nationalism cannot afford not to accept it

Contents

1. Introduction
2. The typical British nationalist does not believe in climate change
3. There is a scientific consensus that climate change is happening and humans are contributing to it
4. Why is the nationalist view on climate change so at odds with the scientific consensus?
5. It is highly unlikely that climate change is a scientific hoax
6. Which human activities cause climate change and what are its potential consequences?
7. The political establishment has been at best apathetic about climate change
8. Nationalism would do much more against climate change than the establishment has
9. We can use these facts to our advantage if we accept climate change as a reality
10. Why this issue might have greater importance

1. Introduction

This article is about climate change and its relation to nationalism.  I will first show that the typical attitude in nationalism towards climate change is one of skepticism and how that attitude is at odds with the scientific consensus, and then I will discuss the probable reasons for this discrepancy, including misunderstanding of the scientific consensus and common misconceptions about climate change.  Perhaps the strongest foundation of nationalist skepticism towards climate change – the belief that it is a hoax created by the political establishment for various purposes – will be dealt with as I argue that climate change is actually a potentially grave threat to the establishment.

In doing so, I will briefly explain what climate change is, how human activity contributes to it, what problems and damage will potentially be caused by it and how the international political establishments have been consistently apathetic about taking action against such an enormous problem to the detriment of our people.  It will then be shown that climate change, far from being a weapon made to be used against us, is potentially one of the most effective weapons in the arsenal of nationalist propaganda and perhaps even one we cannot afford to disarm by refusing to accept the phenomenon as a reality.  We will then finally discuss how this weapon can be deployed.

I would first like to clarify what I mean by certain terms.  I use the term 'climate change' to refer to changes in the Earth's climate due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, the emission of methane and deforestation (this is often called 'anthropogenic' climate change).  Another commonly used phrase is 'global warming' which has a separate meaning: an upward trend in the average temperature of the atmosphere. Incidentally, it is not true that the term 'global warming' has been replaced in scientific discourse by 'climate change' in response to a recent halt in warming – warming has not stopped and both terms have been in scientific use for decades.

Another term I use is 'skeptic', by which I mean anyone who does not believe that climate change is real, but I would like to point out that not everyone who disputes climate change deserves to be called a skeptic; some ought to be called 'deniers', because they are not skeptical but certain.  Skepticism means questioning claims and being willing to examine evidence, and not outright denying something which one has not genuinely sought evidence for, or ignoring evidence when it does exist.  The page at the following URL explains the distinction very clearly and is relevant to other issues as well: http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/04/18/pseudoskeptics-are-not-skeptics.

Unfortunately, since repeatedly referring to people who do not believe in climate change as 'deniers' is likely to provoke needless criticism and condemnation, especially in nationalism – where the use of the term can easily be perceived as an attempted emulation of 'Holocaust denier' – I will use 'skeptic' as a blanket term.  Nonetheless I would like all readers to ask themselves at this point, if they do not believe in climate change, which label would best be applied to them.  Note that it is possible to be skeptical and believe in climate change – in fact, that is the position that a climate-change-accepting scientist would occupy, as scientific research is essentially a skeptical process.

Nationalists can often be very strident people – for the most part, they know what the truth is, and they're not afraid to accuse those who deny that truth of having evil motives.  Maybe stridency should come as no surprise in a movement which rejects a huge amount of what the majority of people have come to call common sense, but it nonetheless exists.  While it is true that adherents of all movements have particular beliefs which they are willing to argue passionately to defend, it seems to me that nationalists are unusually fervent and zealous in defending the consensuses held by their own community.  This means that challenging them has the potential to invite hostility.

For that reason, I would like to pre-emptively tackle some of the potential criticisms there will be of this article or of myself for writing it.  Although I will appear to take a mainstream position on an issue – in fact, I will be taking several mainstream positions – it is not because I am not a nationalist.  I hold the beliefs I hold because I think they are likely to be true.  I advance the policies I advance because I think they are likely to be good for nationalism.  If I am wrong, then I am merely wrong, not evil, and I should like to know why I am wrong and have the relevant arguments presented to me instead of simply being attacked and accused of being one of the enemy.

Much of what is written here, with the exception of the scientific content, is only my opinion and readers may agree with it or not, but every claim I make which is crucial to my argument will be supported with reasoning or with evidence except where facts are assumed for the sake of argument (and these occasions will be clearly identified).  I would like to encourage readers to approach this article with an open mind, despite the fact that it might offend or anger them because of the views it puts forward, and to read until the end before coming to a conclusion, since this matter is potentially a very important one for nationalism if the arguments I make and the facts I cite are valid.

2. The typical British nationalist does not believe in climate change

People in every community, while they may disagree on many things, do sometimes form consensuses on the answers to particular questions, and the British nationalist community is certainly no exception.  Fairly incontestable examples of topics on which such consensuses exist within our movement might include the morality of homosexual behaviour, the historicity of the Holocaust as it is commonly taught, the extent and value of the influence of Jewish people in society and international relations, the importance of race as more than just a so-called social construct and, I would argue, the existence and consequences of anthropogenic climate change.

Note that the statement that there is a consensus on something within a community does not mean that everyone in that community has exactly the same view on that issue – a consensus is merely a general agreement by a large majority of the community.  I think that the general agreement on climate change in British nationalism can be fairly stated as follows: human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, is not a significant driver of undesirable changes to the Earth's climate, and claims to the contrary by scientists and politicians are either erroneous or made as part of a systematic hoax contrived by the political establishment – a theory we will return to later.

It is likely that some nationalists will believe exactly what I have suggested, while others will go further and insist not only that human activity is not a main cause of climate change, but that it is not a cause of it at all.  Some will doubtless go further than that and insist that the climate is not even changing in the first place, and others, probably forming a small minority, will disagree with the statement entirely and claim that the climate is changing and that humans are a main driver.  There may also be points of view on the subject that I have yet to even conceive of, but in any case, that is the consensus as it appears to me.  I will briefly justify this view in the following paragraphs.

Prior to writing this article, the only reason I had for believing this to be the case was the large amount of experience I have talking to nationalists about the subject and seeing references to it in nationalist literature and videos online: the overwhelming majority of the time, I witnessed nationalists expressing disbelief of climate change rather than the contrary.  I am reasonably confident that this will also be the experience of most other nationalists, but since the existence of a nationalist consensus rejecting the existence of climate change is the premise of much of this article, I fully understand that some readers may not find anecdotal evidence for it to be sufficient.

I therefore conducted two Google searches for articles and posts containing the terms 'warming' and 'climate' respectively – instead of 'global warming' and 'climate change' in order to find even more relevant results in case the full terms were not always used – on fourteen nationalist websites: The Daily Stormer, Western Spring, Expel the Parasite, The British Resistance and its two predecessor Green Arrow websites, the British National Party website, the Britain First website, the British Democratic Party website, the Patria website, Stormfront, the website of the Federation of South West Nationalists, the Sarah Maid of Albion blog and the Wigan Patriot blog.[1]

Admittedly the search was not exhaustive as I certainly did not include every nationalist website there is, although I am confident that the sites I did examine constitute a large and varied enough sample to represent a reasonably large cross-section of the nationalist movement.  Neither did I examine every single page returned in the results, although I did include at least the first two pages of results for each term searched on each website, and for most of the websites I examined substantially more than the first two pages for each term.  I am therefore also confident that this will have provided a reasonably large cross-section of the views represented on each website.

I sorted the pages found in the search into categories according to the views expressed on climate change in their contents; some overtly denied the existence of climate change, many contained content which did not overtly deny it but which I judged was very likely to reflect a skeptical view, a large number mentioned climate change but did not express an opinion on it, some seemed likely to be reflecting belief in climate change and a few pages overtly expressed a belief in climate change.  I always ignored comments sections whenever they appeared, focusing instead on the content of the main article.  On forum threads I examined only the opening post.

Knowing that my preconception was that nationalists tended to be climate skeptics, I made an effort to judge each page charitably, meaning that when there was any doubt I would mark it down in the category closer to endorsing the supposed mainstream position rather than in the category closer to rejecting it.  In addition, some pages were marked down as overtly expressing a belief in climate change despite their content being quoted from elsewhere, while skeptical content appearing as part of a quote was often discounted.  I therefore believe that I have been as fair as it is reasonable to be, if not still fairer than that, in assessing nationalist attitudes towards the idea of climate change.

Of the 361 pages I examined, I judged 13 to contain content overtly expressing belief in climate change, 12 to contain content probably reflecting belief in climate change, 108 to express no view, 84 to contain content probably reflecting a skeptical view, and 144 containing content overtly skeptical about climate change.  About a fourteenth of the pages either believed in climate change or seemed likely to, slightly more than a third of them expressed no view, and nearly two thirds of them expressed a skeptical position or seemed likely to be skeptical.  In total then, approximately 90% of pages expressing a view seemed to me overtly or apparently skeptical of climate change.

A poll found on Stormfront asked 'Do you think Global Warming bollocks, or not?' with 372 (61%) of respondents selecting the answer 'Yes, I think Global warming is bollocks', 170 (28%) selecting 'No, I think Global warming is real', 38 (6%) selecting 'I just had a warm shower and feel radiant', and 26 (4%) selecting 'No idea – I am not a “weather”[sic] person'.  The question was not neutrally worded, offered a jocular answer and was only answered by members who saw it and chose to vote, but it can still be used to give an indication of what nationalists think.  Note the lack of a reply that global warming is real but not man-made – some 'No' voters may have selected that instead.[2]

Neither my search of nationalist websites or the Stormfront opinion poll are perfect, but both give a clear indication of the typical nationalist opinion when it comes to climate change.  It is apparent to me from my experience and from the admittedly imperfect research that I have conducted that climate skepticism and, in fact, denialism, predominate in nationalism at an institutional level and at an individual level.  If any readers for whatever reason disagree with this conclusion however, then that should not impact on their assessment of the part of this article which deals with the suggestion of using climate change, and its predicted consequences, in nationalist propaganda.

3. There is a scientific consensus that climate change is happening and humans are contributing to it

The views of scientists are, as far as I have seen, commonly and wrongly excluded from mention in discussions about climate change in nationalism.  When scientists are mentioned, they are often represented either as charlatans taking money in exchange for generating approved research or as climate skeptics.  It is my impression that members of the public, and indeed of the nationalist community, believe that people like Greenpeace and Al Gore are mainstream authorities on climate change.  In fact, such commentators tend to be laymen: people with little or no scientific training and knowledge, few relevant qualifications and no experience in the field.

Media personalities, environmental activists and politicians are not necessarily authorities on climate change and so their output on the subject ought to be taken with a pinch of salt – not trusted absolutely but likewise not used by skeptics to try to discredit climate change when it is erroneous.  The true authorities on climate change are climate scientists who perform research and publish scientific papers reporting their findings.  Al Gore may well make predictions about climate change which turn out to be vastly wrong, but this should not be taken to invalidate the practice of climate science or the predictions made by actual scientific institutes, which Gore has nothing to do with.

The important question to ask is this: specifically among professional climate scientists, what is the typical view about climate change and whether it is caused by humans?  The public perception seems to be that there is a vast disagreement among scientists and I believe this view is reflected in the British nationalist community.  In fact, one American poll found that 45% of the American public think that scientists agree that the Earth is mostly warming due to human activity, while 43% say they do not.[3]  How then can we identify what the scientists really think?  Fortunately, there have been studies examining the scientific consensus on climate change which we can consult.

A 2009 study by Anderegg et al called 'Expert credibility in climate change' examined data relating to the publications and citations of 1,372 climate researchers and found that 97-98% of those most actively publishing in the field (with a minimum of 20 published papers on climate change) 'support the tenets of ACC [Anthropogenic Climate Change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change'.  Furthermore, the study found that 'the relative climate expertise and scientiļ¬c prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers'.[4]  The 97% figure was also produced in other studies and has become quite well-known.

For example, another 2009 study, 'Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change' by Doran and Zimmerman, surveyed 3,146 Earth scientists on whether they thought global temperatures had risen, fallen or remained constant compared with pre-1800s levels and if they thought human activity was a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.  90% answered 'risen' to the first question and 82% answered the second question with 'yes'.  Agreement rose with a scientist's activity and specialization in climate science; 97.4% of climate science experts with more than 50% of their recent papers on climate change answered 'yes'.[5]

The 2013 study by Cook et al called 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' produced a 97% figure for the scientific consensus not once but twice.  11,944 abstracts from peer-reviewed climate papers from between 1991 and 2011 were examined, with 97.1% of those expressing a position on anthropogenic global warming endorsing the consensus position.  Authors were then invited to rate their own papers – of those expressing a position, 97.2% endorsed the consensus position.  The study found that 'the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research'.[6]

We can also examine which scientific institutions officially agree that climate change is real and caused by humans.  There are quite a few: a letter written in 2009 to senators in the United States government stating 'the consensus scientific view' was signed by the presidents or directors of eighteen American scientific institutions, including the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Statistical Association, the Ecological Society of America, the Natural Science Collections Alliance, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the University Corporation for Atmospheric research.[7]

It is not only American institutions which endorse the mainstream scientific view on climate change; so do the Polish Academy of Sciences[8], the Met Office in Britain[9] and main scientific institutions in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan and Russia.[10]  Iran too has a climate change office, the website of which explicitly concurs with the mainstream scientific consensus,[11] as does a joint statement issued by the Network of African Science Academies in 2007, which was signed by academies of science from the countries of Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, Sudan, Madagascar, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Senegal and South Africa.[12]

It is clear to me from the evidence that I have presented that the view of the overwhelming majority of relevant experts in the scientific community is that climate change is happening and that humans are a major contributor to it.  This has been shown to be the case by at least three different studies conducted by different researchers using different methodologies and by statements made on behalf of respected scientific institutions from across the globe, notably even in countries with geopolitical agendas against the western establishment's, countries which arguably have not yet burned their 'fair share' of the Earth's fossil fuels and countries which benefit economically from exporting them.

4. Why is the nationalist view on climate change so at odds with the scientific consensus?

If, on the whole, scientists believe one thing and nationalists believe another, then it is important to ask what makes that the case; people tend to believe things for reasons, whether those reasons are good or bad, and therefore there must be reasons why nationalists have such different views from scientists about the Earth's climate (and vice versa).  Understanding these reasons is important if, as a movement, we are going to endeavour to find out the truth and seek to change people's attitudes in one direction or another – and since the two positions are mutually exclusive (humanity is either a leading contributor to climate change or it isn't) then one of them must be wrong.

One possibility is that the scientific community is in error and the nationalist community is correct in its belief that climate change is not real, but I find this hard to believe for several reasons.  First of all, people who work as scientists in research have generally completed at least three years of study in a science at a university and graduated with an accredited degree – in fact, more than 90% of the Earth scientists responding to the survey used in Doran and Zimmerman had PhDs and 7% had master's degrees[5] – so the scientific community collectively has a large amount of specialised knowledge, scientific training and expertise which the nationalist community lacks.

Furthermore, the scientific community is actively taking part in research while the nationalist community is not – scientists are performing experiments, taking measurements, running simulations, analysing data and reading the papers of other scientists as a full time job, whereas the main source of information about climate change for most nationalists appears to be the mainly non-scientific, mainly skeptical blogosphere.  I therefore think that a reasonable person would expect the scientific community to have on average a much better picture of the past, present and future state of the Earth's climate and what influences it than the nationalist community does.

For these reasons I do not think that the discrepancy between the scientific consensus and the nationalist consensus is adequately explained by reference to the supposed superiority of nationalist expertise on the subject.  Instead I believe that there are two far more probable causes behind the preponderance of climate skepticism in the nationalist movement: firstly, nationalists (as well as other laymen) tend to be convinced by fallacious arguments and myths which make the skeptical position appear more tenable than the consensus position and secondly, nationalists tend to perceive nefarious establishment motives at work which climate change is often cited to justify.

I will first deal with the problem of the myths and misconceptions that abound in non-scientific discussions about climate change.  There are far too many to list in a short paragraph, but some of the most prominent examples of them would include the assertion that global warming has stopped or reversed, the claim that a rise in temperature causes a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration but not vice versa, the myth that changes in solar activity are solely responsible for the warming being blamed on humans, the false statement that Antarctic ice is growing and not shrinking and the hopelessly misled insistence that 'carbon dioxide is good for plants'.

Some of the 'facts' and arguments which are supposed to debunk global warming are so simplistic and obviously wrong that, at least to me, it beggars belief that anybody really takes them seriously.  For example, putting all recent global warming down to changes in solar activity makes the breathtakingly stupid assumption that the world's community of thousands of actively-researching climate scientists have somehow completely forgotten to factor in the possibility that the energy the Earth receives from the Sun might change.  In fact, the amount of solar forcing is a key variable in climate change calculations and the phenomenon of solar cycles is not ignored but well-known.

The skeptic Christopher Monckton is famous for lecturing on the subject of climate change and presenting apparent evidence that it is not really happening.  He has the ability to sound very convincing at first: he is charismatic, he is confident and he is, after all, a 'Lord'.  However, close examination of the 'facts' he presents suggests that the apparent confidence he has in his arguments may be misplaced.  There is an excellent channel on YouTube called potholer54[13] (with an accompanying channel, potholer54debunks[14]) featuring many good videos debunking climate myths, especially Monckton's.  A compilation[15] of his videos on climate change and Monckton makes illuminating, and entertaining, watching.

It doesn't help that myths are sometimes given undeserved credibility by the media.  For instance, a 2013 online Daily Mail story claimed in its headline 'And now it's global COOLING! Return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 29% in a year'[16] and went on to say that 'some eminent scientists' predict a long-term cooling trend which would expose computer forecasts as 'dangerously misleading'.  I wonder which is more dangerously misleading: predicting how the climate will change using masses of data and computer models or announcing global cooling based on two data points just one year apart dealing with ice extent – not volume or thickness – in one part of the world.

Showing the willingness of people to believe things uncritically, some of the most highly-rated comments below the article are those gleefully lapping the story up – several of them admonishing Al Gore for being a 'con man' and making millions from a 'hoax' instead of referencing actual scientists and their predictions – and one of the worst rated comments is futilely pointing out that choosing a record low figure for ice coverage as the start of a trend will obviously create the false impression that ice coverage is increasing.  The very worst rated comment is pointlessly explaining to the Daily Mail readership that trends do not have to follow completely straight lines.

The idea that there is no scientific consensus on climate change is itself a very influential myth; if the community of trained experts is split down the middle on an issue then there must be compelling arguments and evidence on both sides, so it seems justifiable to choose one or the other depending on preference, whereas if the experts mostly agree, one has to demonstrate extraordinary knowledge and reasoning in order to convincingly take a dissenting view.  Climate skeptics sometimes refer to the 'Global Warming Petition Project' which claims over 31,000 scientists as skeptics.[17]  I will address this briefly as it stands in contradiction to the evidence I presented earlier.

One of the claims made by the petition is that 'there is no convincing scientific evidence' that the human emission of greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause, 'catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere'.  Upon reading this I noticed immediately that the petition refers to 'catastrophic heating' and not simply global warming – in other words it does not in fact specifically reject global warming, only the possibility of 'catastrophic' global warming.  Additionally, the claim the petition makes about the lack of scientific evidence only necessarily means that those signing the petition are unconvinced by the evidence, and not that there is no evidence at all (of course, there is).

The total number of scientists claimed to have signed the petition is immediately striking: at the time of writing it stands at 31,487 'including 9,029 with PhDs'.  How is it then that the three studies I mentioned earlier found such an overwhelming proportion of scientists to be in favour of the consensus position?  The answer can be found on the Petition Project's own website: 'Signatories are approved for inclusion [...] if they have obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields. The petition has been circulated only in the United States'[18] – in other words, any American with an 'appropriate' degree can sign it.

In fact, the website lists how many people with each qualification have signed the petition.  Just to list the most frequent, 3,805 of the degrees held by signatories are in 'atmospheric, environmental and Earth sciences', 5,812 are in 'physics and aerospace sciences', 4,822 are in chemistry, 2,965 are in 'biology and agriculture', 3,046 are in medicine and a whopping 10,102 are in 'engineering and general science' – it is hard to see how most of these are even relevant.  Fields are broken down into specific subjects, showing that only 39 of the people who have signed have degrees in climatology.  Note that none of these people are necessarily researchers; many will only be graduates.

I would like to compare the Petition Project with the study by Doran and Zimmerman, in which all of the respondents were qualified in Earth sciences (whereas the petition has signatories from various irrelevant fields), 90% of respondents had PhDs (whereas less than a third of the petition's signatories do), respondents had their scientific output compared (whereas the Petition Project makes apparently no attempt to find out what, if any, research their signatories have performed) and respondents were asked specifically if they thought global temperatures had risen with human activity being a significant factor[5] (whereas the petition only mentions catastrophic heating).

Again, there is no room here to go through every single myth and provide a comprehensive debunking of each one – but in fact, it isn't necessary for me to do so because there exists a website which has done practically that already.  The website is called Skeptical Science and it can be accessed at the the following URL: www.skepticalscience.com.  At the time of writing this article, Skeptical Science lists one hundred and seventy-six climate myths and offers reasoned, in-depth, referenced rebuttals to all of them.[19]  I am confident that it will change the mind of any open-minded person whose opinions on climate change are shaped entirely by one or more of those myths.

It is not only myths which are likely to be responsible for the nationalist community's lack of acceptance of climate change.  Poor perceptions of what the scientific view actually is, and of what climate change is predicted by scientists to do in the future, can also make climate change seem less credible.  Consider the blockbuster movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' which depicts an extreme environmental catastrophe striking suddenly in the near future because of global warming.[20]  Nothing like this scenario has happened or, in the minds of most people, could possibly happen, and it does not seem to reflect any scientific expectations – but there is no way for many people to know that.

Environmentalists produce a similar effect when they utter the phrases 'destroying the planet' and 'saving the planet' – the implication, although perhaps unintended in this supposedly harmless bit of hyperbole, being that human activities stand to inflict planetary destruction on the Earth, which (being billions of years old) has weathered far greater threats than we humans are now presenting to its climate.  As an example of how this sort of language misleads people, Charlton Heston once quoted a passage by Michael Crichton saying that it is 'intoxicating vanity' to think that 'man can destroy the planet'.[21]  Perhaps so, but the scientific literature makes no claim that we can.

Treating statements made by non-scientists as part of the mainstream scientific view and then using the flaws in those statements to attack the mainstream scientific view is fallacious.  I believe that partly the nationalist rejection of climate change is based on similarly fallacious reasoning.  I have witnessed many times nationalists rejecting an idea on the basis of who originated it and for what reason.  To me, this seems as irrational as choosing to deny that breathing is necessary for survival simply because staunch multiculturalists and liberals, if asked, would concur with that fact.  However, this is exactly the kind of logic which is sometimes employed by nationalists.

This brings us to what I suspect is the single greatest reason behind the nationalist community's rejection of climate change: the belief that it is a hoax designed by the establishment to achieve nefarious objectives at our expense.  One practically has to believe in conspiracy theories in order to be a nationalist in the first place – conspiracies by the political establishment to mix out the white race, to destroy the culture of our country, to encourage perversions and to dilute our morals and so on – and with nationalism comes a suspicion of anything mainstream or supported in any way by the political establishment, so it surprises me little that climate change receives this treatment.

An opinion poll conducted by YouGov in 2013 found that 39% of people thought that human activity was making the world warmer, with 16% thinking that the world was getting warmer but not because of humans and the remainder thinking the world was not getting warmer (28%) or saying that they were not sure (17%).  When asked about climate change instead, 53% thought that human activity was changing the Earth's climate.[22]  To me this shows that the level of climate skepticism in the nationalism community is much higher than the level of climate skepticism among the general public, possibly showing a much more cynical, conspiracy-theory driven attitude.

5. It is highly unlikely that climate change is a scientific hoax

For such a conspiracy to exist there would have to be a motive for creating the hoax and a mechanism by which to create it.  During my search of nationalist websites for pages mentioning climate change, I came across this conspiracy theory time and time again and found that various motives often were ascribed to the hoax, including the de-industrialisation of western countries, the introduction of carbon taxes, the construction of wind turbines, the consolidation of power over the people and the justification of membership of the European Union.  I am however unconvinced that inventing climate change would be the best way for the establishment to achieve these aims.

The goal of a carbon tax, if not to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to help mitigate climate change, would be to raise additional revenue for the government to spend.  I do not believe that raising much more revenue is an indispensable part of the establishment master plan: the demographic decline of Britain, the destruction of family life, the drift towards a European superstate and the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich appears to continue unabated without increasing taxation.  If taxation did need to be increased then the promise of higher levels of public spending in order to promote economic growth would surely serve as a much more unquestionable excuse.

I do not really believe that climate change is needed or even useful in justifying our membership of the EU.  It is true that the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, did refer to the EU's supposed necessity for fighting climate change in one of his debates against Nigel Farage, but he did so very much as an afterthought – it did not form part of his central argument, which was much more economic.  The truth is that the people of Britain have shown, for the most part, remarkably little resistance to having their countries and lawmaking powers absorbed into a superstate even after initial promises that it was only a trade organisation were shown to be obviously false.

Before the recent rise of UKIP it could have been argued that there was no realistic possibility that the British people would ever have a chance to reverse our integration into the EU even if they formed a consensus that it was a matter of urgency to do so; every political party has been in agreement with the EU at an institutional level for election after election and so we have had no chance of doing anything about it.  A hoax such as climate change was not needed or even remotely helpful in allowing this situation to continue.  Therefore I reject arguments that the justification of our membership of the European Union ever provided a motive to create a climate change hoax.

Businesses exploiting cheap foreign labour abroad to increase their profits requires no justification from climate change: it simply makes economic sense for those businesses to do so and, given the freedom to do it, that is exactly what they will do.  Besides, closing down a factory in one country and opening a new one (possibly in a country with fewer regulations on things like pollution) cannot be argued to have reduced emissions.  If anything, it will have increased them, as entirely new buildings and infrastructure need to be constructed for it to happen.  The promise of cheaper energy bills from sending coal production abroad would similarly trump climate change.

Despite what agenda, or how many agendas, are served by people believing in and being in fear of climate change and however flawlessly well the fear of climate change might serve them, I would contend that there are always easier ways to achieve those agendas than the instigation of a hoax which is so vast, so complicated and would involve so many people that it could not work, could not be kept secret and could not even be believed to be possible by any thinking person whose job it would be to instigate it.  I will devote some time to explaining why I think such a hoax would be as I have described.  I am not labelling all conspiracy theories impossible or unlikely; only this one.

Critics of conspiracy theories often like to illustrate the difficulties involved with ensuring that the secrets behind a hoax are kept perpetually hidden from the public by all of the individuals who are in a position to reveal them – or, in other words, 'they couldn't keep that many people quiet for so long' (consider also the possibility of deathbed testimonies of people with nothing to lose for spilling the beans).  Some conspiracies require very few people to be 'in on it' whereas others would require many thousands.  I think that, in general, the more people who would need to keep a secret for a conspiracy to be successful, the less believable the conspiracy theory is to most people.

A conspiracy to create a climate change hoax would at least have to include the scientists, of which there are a minimum of some thousands (as we have seen from the surveys) and the people running organisations such as the IPCC to 'promote' the hoax.  This would create far too many potential sources of leaks for a careful political establishment.  I believe that leaking would be a very attractive option to those capable of doing it: the notoriety, popularity and even wealth that came from being the person to expose the hoax of the century would far outweigh the obscurity and small salary most scientists receive compared to what they might be able to earn in the financial sector.

It has been argued that a conspiracy need not involve any actual scientists, as funding could be directed in such a way as to ensure that the only research published is that supporting the idea that anthropogenic climate change is real: scientists producing research that contradicted that idea would have their funding withdrawn and be unable to continue publishing, whereas scientists who produced research confirming it would continue to receive funding and be able to continue publishing.  This would have the effect of creating the illusion of a scientific consensus on climate change whereas the reality might be that the majority of scientists were in fact climate skeptics.

This argument fails to compel me for two main reasons.  Firstly, I do not believe that the scientific consensus could be changed by effectively paying scientists to reach a predetermined conclusion: the data collected from measurements of global temperature, ice thickness, ice extent, sea level and acidity, carbon dioxide concentration, methane concentration, solar output, rainfall patterns, desertification and so on would be the same regardless of payment.  Even if those measurements were in fact faked, individual scientists and researchers would need to be told what their data should be before collecting it, again creating thousands of potential whistle-blowers to be kept quiet.

Secondly, I have never seen any evidence that scientists have been offered funding in exchange for promoting the 'right' conclusions or that scientists have had their funding cut off purely for legitimately challenging those conclusions.  I believe that if such evidence existed, it would have been reported incessantly by climate skeptics as it would be an invaluable piece of evidence and propaganda.  I further believe that such evidence would have been made public because of the thousands of scientists who would need to be knowingly bribed – I cannot believe that so many would be perpetually silent about such a crime essentially for the sake of a meagre salary.

Another thing for climate skeptics to consider is that the 'funding argument' cuts both ways.  Just as they argue that it is possible for control of spending to be used to create an artificial consensus, they must admit that it is possible for different money to be spent to encourage the opposite conclusion to the scientific mainstream.  There are undoubtedly businesses and governments with a vested interest in climate change not being taken seriously: for example, businesses which derive their revenue from fossil fuel extraction or the sale of its products and governments of developing countries hoping to fulfil their growing energy demands by burning fossil fuels in power plants.

In fact, it has been reported that money has been spent by oil companies to encourage climate skepticism.[23]  Considering that what is at stake might be the entire existence of those companies, it is hardly a surprise that some of them are taking the problem of public acceptance of climate change seriously.  My argument is that if the direction of funding is really a viable means by which to control the conclusions reached by scientific researchers, businesses and countries with much to lose from the current consensus would be able to cause a significant number of scientists to reach conclusions in line with their own agendas, and easily so if those conclusions were really true.

Again, under the interpretation that climate change is a hoax, climate scientists would face a choice between continuing to work in relative obscurity earning a researcher's salary – which is not to say that in reality climate scientists do not enjoy their work or make a reasonable amount of money from it, but scientists who were being paid to manufacture false data may not experience the same level of job satisfaction as those doing real science – and receiving a potentially huge payout from interested corporations for blowing the hoax wide open and becoming a noted and widely celebrated figure in the same way other whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden have done.

In conclusion I believe that, far from being a scientific hoax, climate change is in fact a real phenomenon the existence of which is not necessarily a wholly good thing for the political establishment (but which may nonetheless be exploited by the establishment for furthering their own causes).  In fact I would like to argue that it is the opposite of good for them; that it is a problem of their own making, a problem which they have consistently failed to make serious progress towards solving, a problem which will disproportionately effect the poor rather than the rich and, most importantly, a problem which nationalism is far more well-adapted to solving.

6. Which human activities cause climate change and what are its potential consequences?

In order to show that climate change is a problem caused or at least allowed to happen by the political establishment, and how it will disproportionately affect the poor of the world, it is necessary to explain briefly what causes it, how it works and what the consequences will perhaps be if it is allowed to continue unabated.  For the most part I will avoid the use of any mathematics or figures and stick to a basic qualitative description of the science behind climate change to aid understanding – equations and figures are available on various websites for those who wish to deepen their understanding.  Please note also that I am giving a very simplified explanation.

The greenhouse effect lies at the core of anthropogenic global warming and climate change.  Our Sun emits radiation which is able to pass through the Earth's atmosphere and be absorbed by the Earth, then being re-emitted in the form of infra-red radiation which is unable to simply escape into space because some of it is absorbed by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.[24]  This results in energy from the Sun becoming trapped in the Earth's atmosphere, heating it up.  There is no question that some greenhouse effect is a good thing; the Moon, even though it is the same distance away from the Sun as Earth is on average, is too cold for life to exist because it has virtually no atmosphere.

On the other hand, too much greenhouse effect can be a bad thing.  Venus, the second planet from the Sun, has higher average surface temperatures than Mercury despite Mercury being much closer to the Sun.  The reason for this is that Mercury has an incredibly thin atmosphere whereas Venus has a thick atmosphere comprised mainly of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.  Consequentially, the surface of Venus is probably far too hot to be hospitable to life as we know it and would certainly be fatal to humans without adequate shielding.  It is thought that the oceans of Venus boiled away because of a runaway greenhouse effect which made it into the planet we see today.

The conditions on Venus are not the only evidence for carbon dioxide acting as a greenhouse gas: the greenhouse effect with carbon dioxide has been experimentally verified and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere historically correlate with rises in the average temperature of the Earth's climate.  Carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas, and nor is it the most potent: methane is much better at absorbing infra-red radiation, [24] although methane has a half-life of about 7 years in the atmosphere[25] (its concentration halves every 7 years, leading to an initially rapid but eventually slow rate of decline) whereas carbon dioxide, once emitted, is there to stay.

Carbon dioxide and methane are the two most important greenhouse gases emitted by humans.  CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons, chemicals even better at absorbing infra-red than methane[24]), water vapour and ozone are also greenhouse gases.  Water is the most important greenhouse gas directly contributing the most to global warming.  However, this does not mean that the human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is inconsequential: greenhouse gases emitted by humans create a positive feedback effect in that the additional warming they provide causes more water vapour to evaporate, causing more warming and yet more greenhouse gas emission.

Positive feedback is an important phenomenon in climate change.  It is where an increase in some quantity causes an additional increase in the same quantity.  Positive feedback loops alone with no other factors would result in an exponential increase until the quantity can increase no more because of physical limitations.  Other examples of positive feedback in our climate would be the melting of permafrost to release more methane and carbon dioxide that has previously been frozen into the ground and the melting of our permanent ice caps to reduce Earth's albedo (meaning that less solar energy is reflected into space and more is absorbed, leading to greater rates of warming).[26]

Negative feedback also influences our climate; it is where an increase in a quantity causes a change which acts to reduce the same quantity.  The effect of this is to tend to keep things the same; for example, the body's regulation of temperature involves a positive feedback system, as a lower temperature leads to, among other things, shivering, which leads to the body warming up.  Cloud cover is an example of negative feedback in climate change;[27] warming the oceans leads to more water evaporating and forming more clouds, which help to deflect some incoming solar radiation, reducing warming.  Negative feedbacks are important because they work to stabilize the climate.

If positive feedbacks and negative feedbacks balance one another then there is no net impact on the climate.  Of course, they will never be in precise balance because so many factors are constantly changing, but human activities can cause much more rapid global warming and climate change than would occur naturally because they result in positive feedbacks being dominant overall.  This tallies with the warming that has been observed by scientists since the industrial revolution, as it correlates with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  An important question to ask is that of which human activities produce greenhouse gases, so I will briefly discuss this point.

Carbon dioxide and methane, as the two most important greenhouse gases released by humans, are emitted into the atmosphere from a variety of sources.  Vast amounts of carbon dioxide are produced from power plants where coal, oil and natural gas are burned, as well as from the many millions of vehicles on the world's roads which also burn fractions of oil.[28]  Deforestation has the capacity to emit carbon dioxide if the felled trees are burned, but in the long term it also removes trees as a vital sink for carbon dioxide, leading to its concentration to increase.  There are also chemical processes used in industry which release carbon dioxide, such as the making of cement.

Methane is released by processes involving the production, storage and transportation of natural gas (of which methane is the chief constituent).  It is also released by livestock via their flatulence and the storage of their manure.  This is counted as a human activity because the livestock would not exist on such a scale were it not for human agriculture.  Methane is also released from landfills, where it is produced in chemical reactions involved in waste decomposition.[29]  I suspect that the reasons why methane is usually mentioned less than carbon dioxide are that it has a shorter half life in the atmosphere and is produced from sources which we could not always find alternatives to.

The existing and potential consequences of climate change are essential to my argument, so I will describe some of them.  The most infamous of these is undoubtedly sea level rise – even the phrase 'global warming' conjures up images of melting ice.  In fact, it is not so much the melting of ice that causes sea levels to rise as the heating of the oceans – ice which is floating does not raise the level of the water it is in when it melts anyway, but heating causes water to expand and take up more space.  There are various predictions about what sea level rise we will experience: by one prediction there may be up to 6 feet (2 metres) of sea level rise by 2100[30], submerging many coastal areas.

One major factor in the performance of land for agricultural purposes is soil salinity: a high salinity has an adverse effect on plant growth.  A rise in sea level can raise the level of the water table and cause the salinization of soil to occur[31] much further inland than the actual flooding, making potentially vast regions of previously fertile land unusable for crops without intensive efforts to remedy the problem.  In regions of the world where food is already scarce and the population is still growing rapidly, this phenomenon spells catastrophe for the next few decades.  The catastrophe is not necessarily localised either; countries importing large amounts of their food may also suffer.

A good example of a country which is very much at risk from sea level rise is Bangladesh.  Its demographic situation puts the risk into context: its population of nearly a hundred and fifty million people is still growing at such a rate that another hundred million will conceivably be added to that figure before it finally stabilizes.  The population is also predicted to become dramatically older on average in the same time frame, with the number of people above the age of sixty expected to increase by more than a factor of nine.  The country's population density (people per square mile) is already unusually high when compared with other countries with comparable population sizes.[32]

Bangladesh already suffers from frequent and devastating floods and a rising sea level will only serve to exacerbate the problem.  Furthermore, most of the future population growth is expected to occur in slums, and slums tend to be at elevations closer to sea level because those areas flood more often, and so the people with enough money tend to live elsewhere in the country.[33]  Sea level rise will hit the residents of these slums hard and in several ways: groundwater, a main source of drinking water extracted via wells, will become undrinkable as its salt level increases; agricultural land will be impaired; and many living areas may also be flooded with greater regularity.

Another long term impact of climate change will be to change rainfall patterns.  The general rule is that currently wet areas will become wetter while currently dry areas will become drier (this happens because warm air traps more moisture than cold air).[34]  This could mean that places which experience a lot of problematic flooding and storms will experience more of the same, and areas which experience drought leading to dehydration and crop failure will experience more of that as well.  Needless to say, the damage to the global economy and the cost in human life could be huge if these effects are very pronounced.  Environmental refugees would be another outcome of this.

7. The political establishment has been at best apathetic about climate change

Despite the huge number of annual international conferences there have been on climate change,[35] I do not really think very much has been accomplished considering how close we are to reaching an unacceptable level of warming – and the longer we wait to dramatically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, the more rapid the change will have to be if we still wish to fall short of what is often seen as unacceptable level of warming: 2 degrees Celsius.  Stopping just short of 4 degrees of warming would give us more time but the consequences would be much more severe.  I do not think that forced rapid change will be, to put it bluntly, much fun – really we ought to have already begun.

Even the famous Kyoto Protocol holds very little promise.  The Protocol is not an ambitious long-term plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to a point at which the dangers of climate change will be averted - instead, it asks for relatively small (5%) reductions in emissions.  When we are concerned about an unacceptable level of warming occurring within the next few decades, a 5% reduction over the next two decades does not seem very impressive, at least not to me.  Canada actually withdrew from the Protocol citing the fact that China was exempted as a developing country and the US had withdrawn (China and the US accounting for 27% and 14% of global emissions respectively).[36]

One of the biggest things governments are seen to do to tackle climate change is gradually shifting our energy supply to renewable, carbon-neutral sources of energy, often in the form of wind turbines, biofuels (which, incidentally, can be argued to push food prices up as they take up agricultural land to produce) and solar panels with carbon-intensive manufacture processes and long pay-off periods.  I would argue that this has been far too slow so far, will only delay the inevitable climate change by a few decades at most if fossil fuels are not totally abandoned and represents a mere token effort by mainstream political parties to appear as if they are taking serious action.

According to one government document, Britain obtained just 11.3% of its electricity from renewables in 2012.  The same document states that Britain's target as per a 2009 EU directive is that 15% of our energy ought to come from renewables.[37]  Considering that the science on climate change has been clear for decades and considering what is at stake, it is disappointing that our governments have failed to shift the bulk of our energy supply to renewable sources and are only currently targeting 15%, meaning that for decades to come we will be dependent on foreign oil and must apparently suffer all of the geopolitical consequences that come with that dependence.

Successive British governments have also failed to adopt nuclear power on a large scale; less than 20% of our energy is nuclear[38], while in France that figure is around 85%.[39]  The global elite apparently do not even see fit to properly and consistently fund research into nuclear fusion – considered by some to be the holy grail of energy: cheap, non-polluting, carbon-neutral, derivable from seawater and producing far less nuclear waste than fission power – as, for example, funding for ITER, the most promising experimental fusion reactor ever to be constructed, as well as the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, was cut in 2008.[40]  Millions spent now means billions saved later.

The problem I have with shifting to renewable energy in such a slow fashion is that it will really achieve very little in the long term.  Even if we ultimately derive half of our power from carbon-neutral renewable sources, we will still derive the remaining half from carbon-producing non-renewable sources.  It will simply take slightly longer to burn the same quantity of fossil fuels and emit the same quantity of carbon dioxide to cause roughly the same quantity of warming, but those things will still be inevitable.  The one benefit will be that when we finally stop using oil as a main source of energy, we will already have switched to alternatives without any massive upheaval.

The Copenhagen Accord recognised “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius”.[41]  Despite this, carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and some scientists are even warning that the 2 degrees Celsius target will not be met.[42]  Slowly adopting small carbon-neutral energy sources and improving the efficiency of households and appliances will perhaps slow down the increase in emissions and delay the subsequent warming, but as long as fossil fuels are still being discovered, extracted, sold and burned in vast quantities, emissions will continue to rise and so will global temperatures; our politicians are failing us.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that so little has been done compared to what really needs to be done: politicians are elected often for four, five or seven year terms.  They cannot guarantee to themselves that they will be in office much more than a decade into the future.  Any money spent during their term on projects which will pay off during another politician's term will cost them popularity and votes and potentially benefit their rivals.  I think that democracy, while it has its advantages, certainly has some large drawbacks when compared with authoritarianism, and one of those drawbacks has to be an attitude of short-termism being practically inevitable in governments.

It might also be that taking significant action on climate change would result in adopting policies and attitudes which are contrary to the values of people who tend to run countries in the world today.  For example, it might involve getting rid of consumerism, encouraging locally-produced goods at the expense of powerful multinational corporations and lobbies and clamping down on the mass free movement of people and goods.  Those sound to me very much like actions a nationalist government might be willing to take anyway, regardless of climate change – if globalism has failed to solve the problem of climate change, maybe nationalism is what is needed instead.

8. Nationalism would do much more against climate change than the establishment has

I think it is fair to say that nationalist policies and attitudes would result in Britain contributing much less to climate change than it currently does, and if similar policies were adopted in many more countries than Britain, the global contribution to climate change would be significantly reduced.  These policies and attitudes are not specifically targeted to combat climate change, as (as we have seen) most nationalists are in fact skeptics, at least in this country, and do not even recognise climate change as a threat to be dealt with.  This means that nationalism is naturally a better antidote to climate change than the establishment's globalism without even trying to be.

One key nationalist policy which I believe would effect this reduction is the ending of mass immigration of people from poorer countries to Britain and, by extension to nationalists across Europe and America, any white European country.  The per capita energy consumption in poor, less-developed countries tends to be smaller than the per capita energy consumption in rich, well-developed countries[43] laden with expensive consumer goods and services such as high-definition televisions, multiple low-mileage cars per family, computers, mobile phones, foreign holidays taken by plane and food imported from half way across the world just to name a few examples.

The movement of people from countries with low per-capita energy consumption to countries with high per-capita energy consumption, in which it is possible to make money to purchase all of these goods and services and to produce offspring who will go on to do the same, will obviously raise the total amount of energy consumed by the species.  The vast majority of our energy is generated from non-renewable, polluting, carbon-dioxide emitting sources – namely, the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas.  Therefore a higher energy consumption leads directly to higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and to higher global average temperatures.

Many nationalists I have spoken to would like Britain to be self-sufficient.  This means growing enough food and generating enough electricity to provide for our population without having to import foreign goods.  Most of the fossil fuels we burn for power come from other countries and Britain's own coal is not a viable long-term source of energy, so true self-sufficiency absolutely demands that Britain can generate all the electricity it needs from renewables (perhaps nuclear power in the short term and nuclear fusion in the long term).  Similarly, we would import far less food meaning our total contribution to emissions from 'food miles' would be massively reduced.

It is not only self-sufficiency which would encourage a nationalist Britain to abandon fossil fuels in favour of renewables.  It is hard to imagine a nationalist government which was happy to make an American-backed Muslim nation like Saudi Arabia ever richer by continuing to purchase its fossil fuels for decade after decade, especially as the price of oil rises as reserves deplete and the British people are made to pay ever greater prices for their energy to foreign businesses.  It would be better under the nationalist view to produce our energy in this country so that our energy bills, instead of sending money out of our economy to make Arabs richer, pay for British workers to have jobs.

Nationalists who wish to encourage and emphasise the intellectual and technical capability of our people would been keen to invest in research and technology.  One of the greatest pieces of technology we could achieve would be fusion power, a means of producing energy which is virtually limitless and carbon-neutral and could generate nearly all of our energy with no impact on the global climate.  I believe that, had a nationalist government already been in power for a significant length of time, we would have seen vast technological and scientific advancement over what exists today, as Germany experienced under the National Socialist government last century.

Nationalists also tend to emphasise family values and strong local communities including high street shops and separate butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers and so on.  This is in contrast to the establishment-sponsored consumerism which currently dominates Britain, encouraging the mass buying of expensive, energy-intensively manufactured consumer goods from across the world and food which has been grown in various countries from supermarkets owned by enormous multinational corporations.  Nationalists who wish for our people to be healthy and strong are also happy to encourage people to grow their own fruit and veg, again meaning fewer food miles.

Another consequence of rejecting consumerism, and emphasising the health, happiness and enjoyment of nature of our people, is that we would encourage buildings and goods to be built to last instead of breaking down within a short lifetime and requiring them to be repaired, rebuilt or re-bought.  This particularly applies to houses: nationalists tend to believe that our people should be able to live in spacious residences with plenty of space to bring up children and a front and back garden.  Part of that means making sure homes are built to a good standard and such things would last much longer than prefabricated rabbit hutches people are currently expected to inhabit.

Intensive farming methods would likely be abandoned in a nationalist Britain in favour of traditional farming methods, perhaps resulting in slightly more expensive food, but that food would be tastier, healthier and more ethically made than what most Britons currently eat.  We would also use far fewer chemicals on our crops – chemicals such as artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides which take not-inconsiderable amounts of energy and raw materials to produce – and keep free-range chickens and other animals instead of keeping them in battery farms, which are quite cruel and need to be heated, lit up and fitted with powered machinery to distribute feed.

Some nationalists, although by no means all (but still, I would imagine, a higher proportion than exists in the establishment) would like to see Britain experience a massive population reduction even beyond the repatriation of immigrants so that our country's self-sufficiency is made more easy, so that some of our countryside can be returned to nature and so that congestion on our roads and crowding in our cities can be reduced.  A smaller population – which would also be living off far more locally-produced goods and powering their activities from British-owned renewable sources – would have lower total emissions and therefore a much smaller impact on the planet's climate.

9. We can use these facts to our advantage if we accept climate change as a reality

It is safe to say that nationalism in Britain is in very serious trouble.  Millions of pounds spent and decades of hard work by activists to enlighten the people to the truth and stir them into action to prevent the total destruction of our nation have paid off dismally, with the record for nationalist electoral success being held by the now largely-defunct BNP which held a pitiful two seats at the European Parliament and a relative handful of councillors.  To put this into perspective, it would take at least three hundred and twenty six seats in the British Parliament to form a majority government and guarantee a long-term victory for nationalism; we have never won a single one.

This would not be such a serious problem if Britain had remained largely British throughout the aforementioned decades of failure; after all, there might still be a chance to win at some future point once we had learned more about winning hearts and minds, fighting elections and so on.  Obviously, this is not the case.  With every passing year, the demographics of our country change in such a way as to make the electability of a nationalist government less and the electability of mainstream non-racist liberal parties even greater.  It is conceivable that without a reverse in demographic trends, it will become practically impossible for nationalism to win at some point.

I am not going to argue that accepting climate change is going to solve these enormous problems in a single stroke, but I do believe that using climate change and the establishment's guilt for it and inaction about it in our propaganda is one of the many things we ought to consider doing if we want to increase our chances of overcoming them in the future.  Considering how dire our situation is, how huge and persistent our failure has been and how soon it might be that a final victory leaves the realms of possibility forever, I believe that we ought to take absolutely any chance available to us to make our enemies less popular and ourselves more preferable to them, however small it may be.

We know several things.  Firstly, we know that there is a scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it.  Secondly, we know that increased energy consumption is caused by the political establishment's promotion of consumerism.  Thirdly, we know that nationalists who wish to emphasise local communities and locally produced goods, improve the nation's health by promoting exercise and home-grown food rather than television and supermarket shopping and see a reduction in population and the restoration of the British countryside, are better placed to promote policies which would reduce Britain's contributions to climate change.

I believe that these facts are practically unarguable.  Therefore instead of denying climate change, we really ought to be pointing out to the people that it is establishment beliefs, values and policies which work to change the climate (as well as the establishment's apathy which prevents action from being taken to prevent it from happening) whereas nationalism, simply by virtue of its existing beliefs, values and policies, would result in us having a much smaller impact.  Climate change is often considered one of the greatest dangers humanity faces and perhaps as important an issue as immigration.  Why are we incessantly insisting that one of our greatest weapons is a hoax?

The manifestos and leaflets published by nationalist political parties provide the public with probably the best insight into our beliefs and policies that they ever get.  Most party manifestos and policy summaries feature a section on the environment or on energy.  Energy bills, climate change, wind turbines and the quality of the British countryside are issues which are likely to be on the minds of many concerned people, so it could be useful to devote a short sentence in each of these documents to pointing out how the blame for high energy bills, wind turbines, the spoiling of the countryside and climate change lies with the politicians who are elected over and over again.

In fact, a nationalist manifesto which takes climate change seriously has the potential to be, in one sense, greener than the Green manifesto.  The Green Party is opposed to nuclear power, citing the 'dangers' of it and the fact that it is not renewable, as uranium reserves are not unlimited, that it is not carbon neutral and that nuclear waste persists for a long time.[44]  I would argue that nuclear power really causes fewer deaths than coal mining[45] with the exception of poorly-built Soviet-era installations and Japanese power plants built in tsunami territory, and that nuclear power is actually a very good short-term solution to remove our dependence on the much less carbon-neutral oil.

During my search of nationalist websites, I also found many pages featuring articles which had been copied over from other websites – often mainstream media newspaper websites – presumably for the purposes of commenting on them or for demonstrating the widespread promotion of an alleged establishment hoax.  Copying over articles in this way presents an excellent opportunity for making the comment that the establishment is responsible for the very real dangers we face from climate change.  This would not chiefly affect public opinion, because nationalist websites are frequented mainly by nationalists – but it would drive the message home to people in our own movement.

Online discussions, should they be happened upon by a non-nationalist member of the public, can represent nationalism and inform the public's view of what nationalists are like.  We should, when discussing climate change online, be sure to point out the same things I would like to see pointed out by our manifestos and articles.  Again, we will mostly be addressing one another and so forums and comments boards are ideally used to challenge other nationalists on their views – as many will have simply been misinformed by skeptics and the many myths about climate change, resources like the Skeptical Science website and the videos by Potholer debunking Lord Monckton and combating fallacious skeptical arguments should be circulated.

10. Why this issue might have greater importance

I have made my case for climate change as a useful propaganda tool for nationalism but I also believe that widespread nationalist acceptance of climate change is important for two additional reasons.  The first of these reasons is that if nationalism should ever gain political power, and if climate change is a real phenomenon which threatens both economy and ecology, then nationalists will be in a position to decide what, if anything, to do about it.  The first step in solving a problem is recognising that there is one, and so a nationalist government which refused to recognise climate change as a problem would not be well-equipped to deal with it in more than a passive way.

The potential consequences of climate change – sea level rise, crop yield decline and extreme weather to name but a few – could do great harm to the people of this country in the form of financial hardship and destruction of property.  A nationalist government which stood to protect its people would do its utmost to prevent these things from occurring at all reasonable cost – and it may turn out that compensating for the effects of climate change or trying to adapt to it would incur massive expenses in, for example, the construction of flood defences, so it is possible that not bringing about a solution to climate change turns out to be more expensive than doing so.

While Britain's total contributions to global emissions may be very small in comparison to those of other countries such as China, it would still be possible for a nationalist government in Britain to lead the world by example and encourage other countries to reduce their emissions as well.  Even if other countries continued to burn fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate, our country could at least legitimately claim to have the moral high ground, putting us at an advantage in international negotiations.  In any case, it cannot be such a bad thing to rid ourselves of dependence on Arab oil by switching to renewables, which is an inevitable necessity anyway due to oil depletion.

The second reason climate change might be important other than for propaganda purposes pertains to the public perception of the nationalist movement.  As I remarked earlier, conspiracy theories are incredibly widespread in nationalism – many nationalists believe that the attacks on 9/11 were a false-flag operation, that the Holocaust did not happen and that Jews run most of the world and some nationalists believe more obscure theories such as that AIDS is an artificial creation and that governments are poisoning the air and our water supplies.  Many conspiracy theories are no doubt correct in their claims, but it cannot be denied that nationalism has a reputation for them.

I cannot help but think that a reputation for conspiracy theories is potentially extremely repellent to rational, intelligent individuals who might otherwise have chosen to associate with our cause.  While I believe that telling the truth is important, and that in an ideal world the truth (so far as security is still maintained) would be known to everybody, we unfortunately must balance those values against the importance of actually winning our country back.  To this end I believe that dispensing with all unnecessary contrarian views – including climate skepticism – which contribute to an image of nationalism as a cranky, pseudoscientific movement ought to become a priority.

I happen to believe, based on the evidence I have seen and the lack of compelling arguments against it, that anthropogenic climate change is a reality, but I recognise that some nationalists will not.  It might be therefore that those nationalists are unwilling to treat climate change as a propaganda opportunity or to lay blame for it at the feet of the political establishment on the basis that they still believe it is an establishment hoax.  This I fully understand.  It has also been argued to me before that reporting something to the masses which is not true may later have repercussions when people later find out that they were lied to or misled, and so finally I will address these concerns.

If it does somehow later transpire that anthropogenic climate change is not in fact a reality, then we as nationalists will hardly have been guilty of lying if, at the time we claimed it was, that certainty was simply unavailable to us – we would simply have been wrong, not deceitful, and no charges of treason or anything else of the sort could legitimately be brought against us.  Being wrong in the past on the best evidence available at the time cannot be considered by a sane person to be a crime; deliberately repeating things which are known to be false in the full knowledge that it could do damage to a society is far more worthy of condemnation than simply making a prediction.

Moreover, even if a future nationalist government is successfully accused of having lied in order to aid its path to power, it will hardly matter in the scheme of things.  By the time the people are willing to support a nationalist government in the first place, they are unlikely to revert to liberalism, multiculturalism and globalism again simply because of a lie told by a previous generation of nationalists.  Even in the highly unlikely event that the revelation of supposed lies triggers an uprising or a criminal trial, and members of the movement are prosecuted as a result, the country and its people will have been saved at the expense of a few of our lives or freedoms.

In fact, even if one could convincingly argue that coming out in favour of the mainstream position on climate change constituted lying (which would involve proving it conclusively wrong), it would be a lie worth telling in the opinion of many nationalists including myself because that lie could give the movement a greater chance of success than the chance it has now, and after all, the abolition of our nation is a far greater evil than the telling of a simple lie.  Therefore I believe this strategy to be of value to us whatever the beliefs of most nationalists, and whatever the truth eventually turns out to be – although I do not expect that I will find any surprises in that regard.

In conclusion, since our situation as a people is so precarious, and since propaganda is so indispensable to our mission to remedy it, we should surely seek out every propaganda weapon we can lay our hands on and use all of them unrelentingly against our enemies.  I hope that I have shown clearly that anthropogenic climate change is, despite popular nationalist belief, one of the most potent weapons we could hope to find at our disposal and not a hoax.  That is why the title of my article was not why nationalism should accept it, but instead why nationalism cannot afford not to accept it.  For me, the only question that remains is whether we will choose to use it.

Written by the editor of Intelligent Nationalism


Credit to John Murray for research and proofing

Title image from http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php

All references retrieved April 2014

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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous22/5/14 03:09

    Nailed it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Anon. The discussion evidently isn't very lively here, but if you head over to The British Resistance (www.thebritishresistance.co.uk) you will see that my article has been copied over and generated a lot of discussion.

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