Grumpy Guardian

Today ... Aaronovitch doesn't like the good people of Portishead (suburban bigots), Joseph Harker wonders why Le Pen doesn't get the Louis Farrakhan treatment, and that great physicist George Monbiot attacks his fellow physicists Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips.

Monbiot asks :

1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide influence global temperatures?
3. Will that influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?
4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?

All worthy questions. There's just one he doesn't ask :

5. Do global temperatures influence atmospheric carbon dioxide ?

You see the world is a funny, Gaia-like thing, with feedback going in all directions at once. The oceans hold a lot of carbon dioxide. Warm them up and you'll get more in the atmosphere. Which way does the link work ? Are the temperature rise and the carbon dioxide rise due to our outputs, or is higher temperature causing more CO2 to be present ?

Dunno - but it's worth asking. Were there higher levels of CO2 a thousand years ago, when the earth was warmer and the Vikings farmed Greenland ? If only John Daly was with us still.

UPDATE - the Divine Ms M strikes back. "It is always revealing when an attack merely comprises insults rather than a reply to the arguments", followed by "What's Monbiot ever done, except write drivel for the Guardian?" I do love that woman ...

But there is something to cheer us up though.

"All NHS psychiatrists and mental health nurses are to be put through a national retraining programme to root out the racist attitudes that have undermined the treatment of black and ethnic minority patients, it was disclosed yesterday."

As a psychiatrist, Theodore Dalrymple will doubtless be one of the retrainees.

"So rapidly has political correctness pervaded our institutions that today virtually no one can keep a clear head about race. The institutions of social welfare are concerned to the point of obsession with race. Official anti-racism has given to racial questions a cardinal importance that they never had before. Welfare agencies divide people into racial groups for statistical purposes with a punctiliousness I have not experienced since I lived, briefly, in apartheid South Africa a quarter of a century ago. It is no longer possible, or even thought desirable, for people involved in welfare services to do their best on a case-by-case basis, without (as far as is humanly feasible) racial bias: indeed, not long ago I received an invitation from my hospital to participate in a race-awareness course, which was based upon the assumption that the worst and most dangerous kind of racist was the doctor who deluded himself that he treated all patients equally, to the best of his ability. At least the racial awareness course was not (yet) compulsory: a lawyer friend of mine, elevated recently to the bench, was obliged to go through one such exercise for newly appointed judges, and was holed up for a weekend in a wretched provincial hotel with accusatory representatives of every major "community." Come the final dinner, a Muslim representative refused to sit next to one of the newly appointed judges because he was Jewish."

Soon the nation will be divided between those enlightened ones who work for the State and the suburban bigots who don't.