I wish I could add an insightful quip here. But alas, it’s yet another book I’ve written that I can’t read. 😉
The first Skeptics Handbook is now available in 14 languages and the second handbook in 3. Thanks to volunteer efforts there soon won’t be a corner of the world which doesn’t know just how misleading the UN and western media can be.
Thanks to Maniphone Xayavong and some of her colleagues for the pro bono dedication in translating the Lao version.
Click on the image to download the 1.9Mb PDF.
Steve Hyland helped to connect all the right people and suggests these sites in Laos are useful for people who want to know more.
http://www.kplnet.net/
http://www.vientianetimes.com/Headlines.html
http://www.laostudies.org/
http://www.jhai.org/about.htm
http://www.laoplanet.net/
http://laoconnection.com/
http://www.etllao.com/service/internet.html
Volunteers have translated the first Skeptics Handbook into German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Portuguese, Danish, Japanese, Balkan, Spanish, Thai, Czech and Lao. The second Skeptics Handbook is available in French and Turkish. See all posts tagged Translations.
I hope it will help people of Asia not to allow their economies be ruined by anti-development policies of the carbon socialism unlike to Western Green Virus infected societies.
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Well done Jo. Fantastic effort by all concerned and its good to see you are getting a great geographic spread with your books.
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Spread the word. Knowledge is power for all who embrace it. That’s why fascists hate an educated, well-informed public.
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My own anecdotal experience suggests to me that the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming gestalt is largely a Western cultural phenomenon, which carries little resonance outside Europe and the Anglosphere. Sure, if you follow the big climate conferences there is plenty of global support for the transfer of wealth and technology from the West to the developing world, but this is, of course, self-serving mimicry. Many of the diplomats of developing nations (all of whom were educated in the West) see CAGW and ETS policy initiatives as the next big gravy train to ride, little else.
CAGW seems to be philosophic sentiment based upon a kind of nostalgia combined with vestigial Christian guilty. It is the affectation of those intellectually foppish in that post-modern sort of way, which is the vogue of our day, where computer models confirm what their programmers already know to be true and faked consensus trumps real dissent. Those predisposed to believe in CAGW are, firstly, not particularly curious about nature and, secondly, so unimaginatively bored with existence as to believe that we are at the end of our history rather than smack in the deep of it.
None of these emotional states are particularly common among the peoples of the developing world.
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Clearly Jo, the wealth and power of your shadowy backers exceeds even that of the UN.
But who are these powerful individual lurking in the background?
The ordinary people of the world a course, and their power really does exceed that of the UN. Though they don’t always realise it.
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The trickle in the MSM slowly grows !!!
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/05/are_climate_alarmists_losing_t.html
You are winning with your efforts JO.
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Well done, Jo!
I’m sure that average Laotians would be relieved to find that not all westerners are loony.
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Of topic… But is there anything to the Stefan-Boltzmann equation being wrong?… Here is a newstory about it.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/23632
…..and the same thing on Climate Realist.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5783&linkbox=true&position=2
The Science certainly ain’t settled if it is….;-)
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So it’s 14 now. Jo, if you’re not careful you’ll end up being as widely read as Dickens. And you’ll certainly be a whole lot more important considering the times we’re living in. Not bad for book full of technical stuff.
Congratulations.
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Wow Jo! You are prodigious! Your efforts and those like you who are taking the fight to the climate criminals and their useful idiots in the MSM are starting to have tangible results, Even Newsweek is starting to drive the bus over these charlatans. See http://www.newsweek.com/2010/05/28/uncertain-science.html
Please keep swinging away and thanks for all that you do!
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wes george: # 4
Each of the major world religions seems to have a spiritual philosophy that distinguishes it from all others.
For example, Buddhism is based on a philosophy of continuous learning through experience – thus leading to the concept of reincarnation.
Western Christianity is based on a philosophy of sin and the continual need to seek redemption from that sin – it is a philosophy of fear and doubt and retribution.
If you listen to the English upper middle class, for example, they are constantly apologising for having a different opinion, and constantly reinforcing that it is acceptable if you disagree with them. They feel the need to give permission for people to disagree!
The need for retribution in Western culture is also manifest in the strong desire to apportion blame for things that go wrong. Somebody has to be at fault, and must be held accountable. In eastern cultures (apart from India and Pakistan, which still suffer from a British influence) people are much more sanguine.
The influence of Eastern European philosophies, based on communistic atheism or Eastern Christian authodoxy hit the West like a tidal wave with the collapse of the USSR and the reunification of Germany.
And the western culture had little or no option but to go along with the concept that their society was sinful, and inequitable, not because they were affluent due to the distribution of raw materials, or the availability of energy, but because they were affluent by keeping other peoples of the world, without such natural resources, poor.
So yes, they are sinful, and they deserve retribution, and they will pass legislation to impose a tax on themselves, and they will pass this money on to a central agency that will ensure that eventually all peoples suffer the same level of subsistence.
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Just in case anybody is in doubt,
I was being wry in the last two paragraphs in my comment #11. Unfortunately, the art of wryness as a way of making a point, as opposed to sarcasm as a way of negating a point, does not have its own emoticon.
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Eddy,
I couldn’t help noticing that Newsweek ended with this.
Even after showing the whole world why they shouldn’t have said that, they said it anyway. But it’s real progress that they even discussed the matter. One way or another the message is getting out that there’s legitimate doubt about global warming.
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I agree with Rereke points. A Marxist revisionist view of history strongly reinforces our natural cultural tendency in the Western world toward Christian guilt complexes even in our supposedly secular era.
But there is something else even more insidious going on. And that is the largely unexamined assumption that the West is at the “End of History” as the American academic Francis Fukuyama called it in his book of the same name. The idea is basically that history as it was conducted in the past with great World Wars, shifting national borders, totalitarian holocausts and Realpolitik practiced on a grand global scale are a thing of the past. In this model of the world, the west always retains its wealth and standard of living forever even while the welfare state continues to expand entitlements. Democracy and secular humanism sweeps the old tribal warring world of the past away. We all live happily ever after never having to believe or sacrifice, fight or die, for any cause ever again. Just vote Green!
I know, I know to the average working person anywhere this sounds too ridiculous to be the foundational premise from which most of our academic intelligentsia actually base all the rest of their policy thoughts upon. But it’s true. See Garth Evan, for example, who imagines that he and Rudd can convince the nuclear-armed states to disarm simply by reasoning with them from a position of utterly inferior fire-power.
My point is, if you believe that the Western world has reached the highest plateau of political and economic evolution then there isn’t any nation building left to do. No modern day equivalent to the Snow Mountain scheme is on the drawing board, although Australia’s north is a vast empty place with massive potential. But why? We’re done as a people. Australia is compete, a finished work. Beside we’re ashamed of our grandfathers and mothers and all they accomplished that made us rich, free and safe. How empty must the future seem to a young person today? The real anthropogenic catastrophe of our day is a societal failure of imagination.
Imagine the giant hole this leaves in the heart, the spirit of a nation. Nevertheless, the human spirit is ever renewing life and cannot bear a vacuum for long. So the left has invented a pseudo-cause to distract our attention from the real issues: We must regiment ourselves into a collective and rise to the challenge of the day–which is to control the very climate of planet Earth through a centralized authority. Their will be sacrifices a plenty.
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Please let me know if you’re interested to translate it into Italian.
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