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James
Delingpole

James
Delingpole

James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about
everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books
including 365
Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy, Welcome
To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How
To Be Right, and the
Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is http://www.jamesdelingpole.com/.

The man who 'invented' Global Warming

By James
Delingpole Politics Last updated:
December 30th, 2010

Comment on this Comment
on this article

Mr Tickle: altogether funnier, nicer and more useful
than Sir Crispin Tickell

I’m in Ireland this week and am not yet sure how close I’ll be to the
internet. So to tide you over just in case here is a fascinating essay from
Ishmael2009 (not his real name) on Sir
Crispin Tickell is one of the chief architects of Man Made Global Warming’s
towering cathedral of half truths, exaggeration, hysteria and Neo-Malthusian
lunacy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the mighty Ishmael2009…..

Our Man at the Climate Summit: Essay on Sir Crispin Tickell

Sir Crispin Charles Cervantes Tickell is one of the most influential people
behind the idea of man-made global warming. Yet you could easily be forgiven for
having never heard of him.

Tickell, you see, is a diplomat and a scion of the British establishment, and
as such works largely behind the scenes, like a real-life Sir Humphrey. His CV
bulges with numerous honorary doctorates, chairmanships and directorships around
the world, including the European arm of Pachauri’s TERI organization (1). After
starting as a bright young thing with the civil service, he spent two years at
Harvard, where he addressed himself to the up and coming subject of climate
change, the result of which was his 1977 book Climactic Change and World
Affairs, a work that detailed the threat posed to Western civilization by
possible changes in the world climate. It made his name, and on his return
Tickell was made Chef de Cabinet to the President of the European Commission and
afterwards advisor to the Thatcher government, where he was instrumental in
persuading leading politicians to put global warming on the political agenda
(11).

So is AGW the most serious threat facing the world today, so far as Tickell
is concerned? Well, almost. There is one other threat that he sees as even more
urgent than AGW – the human race itself. Specifically, those feckless,
irresponsible classes and nations that continue to breed at more than the
replacement level of 2.1 children (Tickell, it should be noted, has three
children. Considerations of overpopulation do not apply to his class, of course
(1)). For him, overpopulation is the driving force behind AGW: we are a cancer
on the planet. In language which we would normally expect to come from
extremists, Tickell lays out his vision of the rest of the world.

We are, he believes, “a malignant maladaption in the corpus of living
organisms, and behave and reproduce like a virus out of control” (2). We are
“infected tissue in the organism of life” (3). “More than ever,” he writes,
“humans can be regarded like certain species of ant” (5).The only relief from
this that Tickell sees on the horizon is that “it is hard to believe that there
will be anything like current or future human numbers in their present urban
concentrations or elsewhere. Whether weeded out by warfare, disease,
deteriorating conditions of life, or other disasters, numbers are likely to fall
drastically. We must, I believe, expect some breakdowns in human society before
the end of this century with unforeseeable outcomes” (4). That’ll teach us to
pollute his nice clean world!

Of course, Tickell is well aware that in every single industrialised country,
total fertility rates (TFR) have fallen below replacement levels – in other
words in modernised nations population is declining. The real threat, then, is
from the feckless hordes in the less developed nations. Overpopulation and
climate change will, he warns, lead to refugees from these countries becoming a
“prime threat” to Western society in coming years (3).

For Tickell, these refugees are clearly at the root of his concerns. They
represent a threat to Western culture as they “bring with them alien customs,
religious practices, eating habits, agricultural methods, and – not least –
diseases” (3). Yikes! Those horrible, horrible people! He warns that
environmental refugees “like normal refugees . . . mostly rely on charity” and
worst of all “tend to spread their poverty around them” (3). Tickell claims that
“full assimilation” into national culture “is rare” and cautions that in the
event of rapid change these refugees would be “only one of myriad animal species
trying to cope with disruption of their [unassimilated] way of life” (3). They
are, he tells us, a “dangerous element” in Western society and their presence
will have “secondary effects” such as “disorder, terrorism, economic breakdown,
disease, or bankruptcy” (3). Remember, these warnings come from the man largely
responsible for putting AGW on the world political map.

Of course, the real nightmare scenario for Malthusians has always been not
overpopulation per se, but differential fertility, so that the fecund foreign
hordes pour into an under-populated and degenerate West. This is also a worry
for neo-Malthusians such as Tickell as well, it seems. Pointing to the fact (as
he sees it) that illegal Mexican immigration into the USA has led to many parts
of America taking on “Hispanic characteristics”, he foresees a tidal wave of
foreigners swarming into the under-populated areas of the world:

Desperation could push Africans into Europe, Chinese into the relatively
empty parts of Russia, the Indonesians into northern Australia. Sheer numbers
could swamp most efforts at control (3).

Double yikes! Start breeding chaps, there’s billions of ‘em! So, clearly, as
industrialisation leads to a decline in population, what Tickell demands is the
modernisation of the poorer countries, right?

Well, no. There aren’t enough resources to go around, you see. Tickell
demands that the world pursue”‘sustainable development”. What does that phrase
mean? He doesn’t spell it out exactly, but he does know one thing – what was
right for the West is not right for the rest:

We should also be clear what it [sustainable development] does not mean:
following the methods of industrialisation espoused in the West [ . . . ]
Instead it should mean something specific to each country or regions’
resources and culture (6).

Like fellow neo-Malthusian Jonathon Porritt who believes that allowing poor
nations to have an electricity grid would be “the end of the world,” Tickell
believes that instead of allowing poor nations to industrialise, thus lowering
their fertility rates as every developed nation has done, they must lower their
populations without first industrialising (7).

At a lecture to The Royal Geographical Society in March 1990, while among
friends and colleagues, Tickell spelt out exactly whom he was referring to.
Industrialisation in the developed Western world was fine, as it “grew out of
previous history” and was sustained by a “resilient” environment with the result
that although the environment was greatly altered little irremediable damage was
done” (12). Non-Western countries, sadly, do not have the same “history” and
have not yet learnt to stop breeding, and so must not be allowed to follow the
same path of modernisation. Well, of course. Makes perfect sense, if you’re a
neo-Malthusian.

This is reflected in UK government policy towards global warming, according
to Left-wing environmental historian David Pepper, who observes:

. . . the British Government (advised by neoMalthusian Crispin Tickell)
predictably used Neo-Malthusian arguments at the Rio environmental summit in
1992 to try to shift the blame for global environmental degradation from the
West to third world countries (9).

Tickell, unsurprisingly, puts it differently. Overbreeding by poorer nations
is he claims “the biggest single environmental issue” and was ignored at Rio,
thanks to a “tacit conspiracy”, though he forebears to mention any names behind
this ‘conspiracy’ (13).

Like all neo-Malthusians, Sir Crispin Tickell knows full well that fertility
rates in industrialised countries always decline to a perfectly manageable level
as people decide to more with their lives than simply raise children. If
overpopulation really is a problem, then the solution is simple:
modernisation and industrialisation – which is exactly the route these countries
are pursuing for themselves. To compare mankind in general with “infected
tissue” and demand that poor countries simply stop breeding before they
modernise is surely not acceptable. But then, our man behind AGW doesn’t see it
that way.

————–

1)     Crispin Tickell CV at his website http://www.crispintickell.com/page109.html

2)     Crispin Tickell, ‘The Ecological Challenge in a
Global context’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page61.html

3)     Crispin Tickell, ‘Risks of Conflict – Resource and
Population Pressures’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page13.html

4)     Crispin Tickell, ‘Visions of the 21st
Century. The Future: A Bumpy Ride’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page22.html

5)     Crispin Tickell, ‘Environment, Islam and the
Future’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page146.html

6)     Crispin Tickell, ‘Development in an Unstable
World’. http://www.crispintickell.com/page95.html

7)     Jonathon Porritt, ‘An Audience With Jonathon
Porritt’ Tuesday 7th October 2003 @ The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester.

8)     Jonathon Porritt, ‘Population the Number One
Issue’ http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.media.archive.html

9)     David Pepper, ‘Modern environmentalism: An
Introduction’ page 279.

10)  Crispin Tickell, ‘Environment on the Edge’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page87.html

11)  Brian Wynne, Peter Simmons et alia, Learning to Manage Global
Environmental Risks. Vol. 1 (MIT Press, Mass: 2001). P. 103.

12)   Crispin Tickell, ‘Human Effects of Climate Change: Excerpts
From a Lecture Given to the Society on March 26th’, 1990. Royal Geographical
Society.

13)   Crispin Tickell, ‘The Human Species: A Suicidal Success?’
The Geographical Journal
Vol. 159, No. 2 (Jul., 1993), pp. 219-226.
P. 224.

Tags: AGW, Crispin
Tickell, Malthus, prophet of
doom

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