Please explain….. I just do not understand why a large section of the ruling class is so actively into the promotion of green hysteria. One could almost begin to suspect some sort of weird science fiction scenario involving alien mind-control, or something….
Just have a look at this ad. produced for children by the British government (at a cost of $10.7 million dollars!)
Note: I got the video from You Tube, where the person who posted it has added a plug throughout for the film “Not Evil, Just Wrong” …… this may make you heave a sigh of relief, and think it’s a spoof … but it’s not.
Brendan O’Neil has an article about it in today’s Australian, by the way: Panic Little Ones, it’s the Carbon Monster.
Oh good there is life at Strange Times after all.
Er Keza did you ever read the works of the social Darwinists who took the work of Charles Darwin and used it to justify the worst excesses of 19th century Capitalism?
Did these absurdities destroy the underlying truths of evolution?
Sorry but you fail logic 101.
Dalec
There’ clearly something desperate happening in terms of governments needing to convince the public that they should be willing to pay more for less efficient sources of energy while also having living standards and expectations lowered. Could it be that everyday folk are no longer being frightened – depsite the best efforts of the capitalist press, the public broadcasters, MTV, CNN, and the super-rich celebrities of Hollywood?
The British Government’s television advert reeks of weakness and desperation.
“Let them eat carbon”?
Ooh Noo Barry this is all part of the plot to install world gummint, according to noted denialist – Viscount Monkton http://community2.myfoxatlanta.com/_Copenhagen-goal-is-1-world-government/blog/1291440/77914.html
If you knew any-thing at all about energy generation you would know that the entire system is hobbled by its 19th century roots. Vast sume of money are required just to maintain the ancient asset that is our electricity grid. Huge amounts of money are being spent in global programs designed to improve the efficiency and to reduce or maintain the cost of electricity to the consumer. This program is driven by the profit motive, it has nothing to do with CO2 emissions although it may surprise you to know that improvements do result in CO2 emission reductions.
In Australia about 60 Billion dollars has to be spent just to keep the 50+year old electricity supply network from total collapse.
No Barry the gummint has not been captured by rabid greenies, it has been captured by greedy capitalists, hello is that new?
Dalec
Since you “lost” my last post you might like to bring yourselves up to speed with what is actually happening in the world.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,655107,00.html
Dalek
There is something bizarre about it… But fundamentally we should not be surprised about large sections a reactionary moribund ruling class promoting irrational obscurantist ideas. Nor that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas.
The last century saw the first imperialist “Great War” – supported by what were previously thought to be the workers parties. That was followed by another world war with fascism supported or collaborated with by dominant sections of the ruling class in most countries and appeasement widely supported (including among the “pacifist left”) in others.
In our lifetime we’ve seen the Vietnam war.
Generallly speaking people are significantly less irrational and superstitious than they used to be.
What’s bizarre is not the promotion of hysteria by governments but the obliteration of rational left politics. The two do somehow fit together, but we still haven’t figured out how.
The truth is that the huge multinational companies that provide key services to the global electricity supply system have seen a huge opportunity. They have seized upon the growing concern about the parlous state of the supply infrastructure and the growing concern about CO2 emissions to implement radical and transformational technologies.
These include vast wind farms in the North Sea and immense solar farms in Africa. See the link I posted above: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,655107,00.html
You see the ruling class has a serious problem; studies have shown that the present centralised generation model is unable to support the expansion of the electricity supply network as it exists today.. The problem is exacerbated by the antiquated nature of the network and by design rules that are no longer relevant.
The concern about CO2 emissions plays into the need to fix the network. This imperative is driven by the simple fact that if the electricity supply fails there will be a huge public backlash and real economic damage to capitalism itself.
The problem for the governments is that they must find a way to raise the money from us to pay for the new infrastructure.
It is also true that studies by the insurance industry have lead them to conclude that global warming is really happening and that they stand to lose a huge amount of money if the sea washes through the Gold Coast or over Manhattan. (Try to buy insurance for a sea front property today and you will get the picture) Thus they have joined forces with the giant service companies such as Siemens and ABB.
The plan is to entirely restructure the power grid and to introduce low CO2 emissions generation facilities as quickly as possible.
So the Governments are doing what they all do so well, attempt to manipulate public opinion.
That they do this should not surprise any-one, after all we all remember the manipulation that surrounded the Vietnam War, the war against Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
Should we be surprised that the same techniques are in use to persuade people of the danger from Global warming.
It is a campaign like all the others, the truth is irrelevant to these guys.
Dalec
“Please explain….. I just do not understand why a large section of the ruling class is so actively into the promotion of green hysteria. ”
Simple. Because i gives prestige to jump on the latest do-gooder bandwagon, and it gives power because everyone else is doing it, plus it increases centralization of governance due to the cross-border effects of environmental issues.
Woulda thought Arthur might have caught up witn Climategate by now? You too, Kez!
Hi Gurujane, The scandal to which you refer – “Climategate” – seems too good to be true, in a sense, and therefore perhaps worth waiting to see whether it is as true as it seems. It’s probably a case of an insider, a ‘whistle-blower’, rather than a hacker. For those who do not yet know: someone has published hundreds of private emails between leading climate scientists of the alarmist school and these emails reveal some conscious deception and rigging of the figures.
It will be interestng to see whether the mainstream media picks this one up. Certainly would help sell some papers and doesn’t look good for those doing the deceiving and trickery, if that is in fact the case.
Anelegantchaos site has a portal into the emails:
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/search.php
Hi Barry! What can one say? I read these emails with bulging eyes thinking this must be the greatest hacker/forgery of all time. The emails are just so blatantly and juveniley (is that word?) self incriminatory they must have been written by an obsessed climate skeptic, but so far the senders and recipients have only admitted them!
Speaking as one of the technically challenged, can you or anybody tell me how big a task is it to hack into a website like this and download this amount of stuff before it is noticed? How long does it take? Would they have to have download everything and cherrypick later? Or would they have time to peruse the lot inside the site and just download the ones they wanted? Could the hackers have downloaded say a couple of weeks ago and so have time to doctor the emails? Un.believ.able!
First heard of it just now here. Am currently downloading the 61MB zip file through bit torrent software. Correction just downloaded and extracted to 157.5GB and now uploading to others. Only took a few seconds as there are over 500 peers “seeding” ie uploading chunks of the file to others.
I won’t have time to study it carefully but recommend others download it too rather than relying entirely on journalists and bloggers selections. Should be able to add some more insight to the analysis.
BTW follow the “see also” links at the bottom of the wikipedia page if you aren’t already struck by the implications of peer to peer file exchange.
Took a while to find the download URL. FWIW my impression of the small amount I absorbed while scanning very quickly through numerous reports was that it just nailed down proof of what is already widely understood about the “advocacy” of official science. Didn’t notice anything eye bulging.
Re technical issue. Looks like a routine breakin of an insecure departmental mail and file server. Nothing remarkable about volume. Probably crackers would have quickly grabbed everything available and quickly selected 61MB zip file simply excluding completely irrelevant trivia. Official statement from the Climate Research Unit tacitly confirms its genuine, merely noting that its too voluminous for them to verify that no items have been added or tampered with, which is fair enough.
I couldn’t resist skimming (VERY lightly) through the documents and code. Too many VERY boring emails to consider looking through those. Here’s the largest list of highlights I’ve seen from blog posts (presumably from the originators – rest may just be commentary on these):
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
This is a limited time offer, download now: http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip
Sample:
0926010576.txt * Mann: working towards a common goal
1189722851.txt * Jones: “try and change the Received date!”
0924532891.txt * Mann vs. CRU
0847838200.txt * Briffa & Yamal 1996: “too much growth in recent years makes it difficult to derive a valid age/growth curve”
0926026654.txt * Jones: MBH dodgy ground
1225026120.txt * CRU’s truncated temperature curve
1059664704.txt * Mann: dirty laundry
1062189235.txt * Osborn: concerns with MBH uncertainty
0926947295.txt * IPCC scenarios not supposed to be realistic
0938018124.txt * Mann: “something else” causing discrepancies
0939154709.txt * Osborn: we usually stop the series in 1960
0933255789.txt * WWF report: beef up if possible
0998926751.txt * “Carefully constructed” model scenarios to get “distinguishable results”
0968705882.txt * CLA: “IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science but production of results”
1075403821.txt * Jones: Daly death “cheering news”
1029966978.txt * Briffa – last decades exceptional, or not?
1092167224.txt * Mann: “not necessarily wrong, but it makes a small difference” (factor 1.29)
1188557698.txt * Wigley: “Keenan has a valid point”
1118949061.txt * we’d like to do some experiments with different proxy combinations
1120593115.txt * I am reviewing a couple of papers on extremes, so that I can refer to them in the chapter for AR4
They can be looked up via via Barry’s “anelegantchaos” link above.
Re the documents:
1. communicating_cc.pdf and RulesOfTheGame.pdf are fascinating UK government publications on the PR campaign. Sheds light on why its so “bizarre” as standard PR approach of manipulating emotions.
2. MannHouseReply.pdf is interesting in the light of the code. My impression is that the bizarre refusal to provide code with claims of “intellectual property” is adequately explained (as usual) by its complete disorganization and enormous amounts of data manipulation extracting pretty graphs for papers from hopelessly undocumented and maintained data sets. (That isn’t conspiracy, it’s normal).
3. AR4SOR_BatchAB_Ch06-KRB-1stAug.doc would be interesting to anyone wanting to understand IPCC internal peer review process.
4. uea-models.ppt strongly reinforces my prejudice that there is a strong resemblance between the “believers” in climate models and economic models. Back in the early 1970s it was demonstrated that the “state of the art” economic models were less useful than simple ARIMA models (ie the sort used by statisticians to produce “seasonally adjusted” statistics that are more useful than the raw data). I gather the domination of peer reviewed journals etc is rather similar to that in the economics “profession”. Its really quite curious to see that at the time of that presentation they hadn’t even got as far as routine paramater sensitivity analysis.
(Of the above only item 3 would not have been publicly available).
Like Gurujane, I’m not strong on technical stuff but this item from People-powered News suggests a case of ‘whistle-blowing’ by an insider:
“The recent release of documents from the East Anglia University by a “hacker” could very well have been an inside job. Two comments on The Volokh Conspiracy make interesting points about the circumstances of the release that point towards the release of the data by someone inside the institution:
“lucklucky points out: Yes it appears an inside job, the initial nick of the person that released them was FOIA and reasons stated is that this shouldn’t be hidden from public.
“While that’s an interesting, but weak argument on its own, it gets stronger when put in context with this point from GaryC:
“The last date on an email message is November 12, 2009.
“On November 13, 2009, Steve McIntyre was informed that his FOI request for data, much of which is in this data package, had been rejected.
“That doesn’t “prove” anything, but it certainly suggests that an insider who was aware of the contents of the data package, because he (or she) had been involved in assembling it to respond to the FOI request, decided to act as a whistleblower. The probability that it was an outside hacker seems very low, at least to me.
“Scientists should be furious about this clear breach of scientific process and ethics by the climatologists at University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. Most scientists I know are highly ethical people who would never dream of putting an ideology above their scientific integrity and I believe would be capable of being a whistleblower in this situation. All of this data, collected no doubt with public funds, should be in the public domain. It goes without saying that all research data should be posted publicly as well, the same way evidence produced in a courtroom is in the public domain. Stay tuned”.
Link: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/0000000000000531
Six days after the emails came on line and so far no-one involved at East Anglia has challenged their authenticity. If no challenge is forthcoming this would suggest it was an inside job and they know it.
Interesting that it was a pommy High Court judge who recently drove holes through factual errors in Gore’s Incovenient Truth. Also if I remember correctly a recent public oponion poll revealed the people of GB are far more skeptical of climate change alarmism than the rest of the developed world.
Ah well, this was the country whose Royal Society led the Enlightenment. I now believe a significant portion of the genuine scientific community over there will start speaking out and will force a Royal Commission. Am also thinkiing that East Anglia may be forced to close Hadley down, or at least suspend/sack the implicated scientists there.
Then there will be a knock on effect in the US … etc, etc.
GuruJane
Actually there are emails that prove that it is actually an alliance of Al-Qaeda Opus Dei and George Soros who are behind the whole global warming scare.
What I see is the usual back biting, smart arsed comments and such that are part of the territory for research institutes.
Don’t get too excited.
Dalec
Does seem likely to be an “inside job”, perhaps a sysadmin or other “assistant” required to help clean up the conseqauences of their egomania eg see HARRY_READ_ME.txt for a blow by blow account of reactions of someone attempting to reproduce their own results from hopelessly undocumented and unmaintained databases and code that would have exposed them to considerable ridicule if they had simply “annoyed” their FOI harassers by just dumping the raw material on them in full compliance with the FOI laws instead of huffing and puffing.
Much of the commentary is overblown (as always) but the defence at realclimate.org offers nothing in rebuttal of the fact that they have been caught red-handed at a level of manipulation of the “peer review” process to push their own line and exclude disagreements that thoroughly discredits the IPCC and related “official science”.
That doesn’t tell us anything about the climate. What it tells us about the “climate alarmists” and “official science” was already well known but now thoroughly proved.
I’ll be very interested in analyses of the emails. I have no intention of trying to read them myself – no time. As I said before, it will be interesting to see how (whether) the mainstream media responds to this. From my reading of commentaries thus far, in this early stage, it seems the emails suggest a conscious manipulation of the peer review process. If this is the case, then it is enormously serious and I’ll be getting excited.
Check out the commentary of Dr. Tim Ball, who holds a doctorate in climatology from the University of London and who taught climatology as a professor at the university of Winnipeg for many years: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/0000000000000535
Seems like much more than the usual ‘back biting’ that occurs in and between research institutes of all kinds. This could be VERY BIG.
Arthur, for once we are in a (sort of) agreement. Do scientists manipulate data, fudge reports, argue and character assassinate each other? Yes. Does a bear shit in the woods? yes.
Do the private diaries of Darwin assist the exposition of The Origin of the Species? No they certainly do not. Do the non scientific ravings of Newton and his fights with other mathematicians devalue his major contributions ? No they do not.
That a whole lot of second raters should climb onto the climate change bandwagon should be no surprise at all. Equally that a whole lot of second raters should attempt to refute the climate change due to CO2 increase hypothesis should come as no surprise.
This is how science works in reality. It is not carried out in some ideal world. The debates about Darwin’s theories, for example, continue to this day.
The science behind CO2 emissions began with Svante Arrhenius in his paper entitled:
“On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” Published in April 1896
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf
The fact that Arrhenius went on to advocate eugenics does not detract from the scientific validity of his work, in particular the (so-called) Arrhenius equation.
Like yourself, I reserve the right to disbelieve a scientific theory, even relativity and quantum theory.
The real question is at what point does one abandon ones skepticism and act on the evidence? Is the theory a tool for action?
The other question for me is that the measures that are required to minimise CO2 emissions are sensible modernist responses. If you want the whole of Industry; power generation and transport to remain mired in 19th century technology then you should say so.
Dalec
Barry’s link to Tim Ball’s description of a clique manipulating the peer review process adequately refutes (in advance) Dalek’s usual breathtaking incomprehension of the elementary requirements for actual science to defend itself from “Official Science”.
Naturally the pre-medievalist (essentially nature worshipping) eonomic and political conclusions drawn by “Official Science” with a program to confine human consumption within caps and trade the caps appeals to Dalek as a “sensible modernist” approaches while the actual necessity to unleash the potential of science with a massive shift of economic activity to R&D is incomprehensible to him.
PS the following should be added to my list of 4 highlights from quickly browsing the documents.
In item 3 ipcc-tar-master.rtf and ipcc-tar-master.rtf from 1999 are worth looking at before the longer one from 2006 listed.
In item 4 the date at which they were merely proposing to carry out a proper parameter sensitivity analysis was October 19 2007. Just to clarify, when I said “Its really quite curious to see that at the time of that presentation they hadn’t even got as far as routine paramater sensitivity analysis.” what I meant is that its really quite mind boggling that ANY attention was paid to their “predictions” given that they had not met this elementary requirement.
Also BTW an example of the sort of public documentation of numerical techniques that should have been routinely required and which they brought themselves undone by refusing an FOI request to provide (because their data was in such a mess), while is here. Half a hat tip to realclimate.org for the link (half because they seem to regard it as a defence of their failure to do what they should have felt obliged to do).
HARRY_READ_ME.txt should be added as item 5 to understand their complete incapability to do it. These are the “first raters” who have been deciding what “second raters” to exclude.
I’m still finding it hard not to get excited about Climategate. Even George Monbiot, one of the hardest-core alarmists, had this to say in the Guardian:
“It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them…
“Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request(4).
“Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics(5,6), or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(7). I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign”.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/23/the-knights-carbonic/
Monbiot is still an alarmist, none the less, which makes his position rather Pythonesque. You know…. sort of like … ‘Notwithstanding that some of the key research on which the IPCC has reached conclusions is now known to have been manipulated to orchestrate a result, and that legitimate dissident scientific voices have been suppressed, and that strenuous efforts were made to resist access to data under FOI, why should I be sceptical?’
After all, what DID the Romans ever do for us?!
And v telling is the grovelling apologies Monbiot makes to early posters in the Comments section. This must be soooo big in the UK. The chattering classes would be talking of nothing else.
Looking at the politics here, it was interesting to see today Rudd has made huge concessions in an effort to get bipartisan legislation up, making a total joke out of any pretense to real committment to slow carbon emissions. Clear indicator that Official Science had already reached the peak of ability to affect the public/voters mind before the Climategate expose. Focus groups must have been telling him that.
All governments have always known it was bullshit, otherwise they would all have beeen fast-tracking a switchover to nuclear power as a stopgap measure. They have been managing the growing political hysteria over the last few years by (a) buying off the Official Science lobby with funded frequently flying trips in carbon-emitting aircraft to discuss the “crisis” in air conditioned/centrally heated carbon emitting 5 and 4 Star accommodation, usually in third world developing countries (b) lavishly funding Official Climate Change Science without making it accountable and (c)instituting the minimal carbon emission changes they feel crucial to assuage the voters, increasing them incrementally as the hysteria grew.
The problem for Rudd, and Obama for that matter, is that they arrived in office just as the Official Science hysteria was peaking, which caused them to both rush to sign Kyoto and make a big deal out of Copenhagen.
Rudd being the political animal he is has realised the climate change craze is now well and truly passing so he desperately needs a bi partisan bullshit Bill before the next election to neutralise it as an issue. The only question is will the coalition give it to him?
My lower level of excitement is summarized in comment #100 here.
It’s been widely known that a small group has dominated the peer review process for a long time, preventing publication of opposing views. (Its known because naturally those opposing views have nevertheless been published, in less prestigious journals – nobody can prevent that). Its now been formally proved in a way that should discredit that group sufficiently to open up the process and have less “official science” table thumping certainty.
However as far as I know the arrogance of that group reflects the fact that there IS an overwhelming consensus among those qualified to have an opinion about climate science so I wouldn’t expect a radical change in the conclusions. As Einstein said in response to the statement of One Hundred Scientists against Einstein, “”Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!”
The clique took the opposite attitude that since they know they are right it is intolerable that wrong papers should be published anywhere “respectable”, which is symptomatic of “official science” and has to be fought. But if anybody actually could prove them wrong it would have blown up in their faces long ago.
That remains irrelevant to the question of what, if anything, to do about AGW. Unfortunately a less dogmatic approach from a future IPCC is likely to only give greater credibility to the really absurd economic policy ideas that are the actual problem.
Monbiot’s concessions reflect his tactical desire to throw Phil Jones to the wolves while continuing the non-debate about economic policy. Even though I haven’t been following the AGW “debate” it would be impossible to be unaware of the growing complaints about the clique dominating peer review. Monbiot’s pretence that he is shocked, shocked to learn of it for the first time should fool nobody.
On the other issues, destroying emails about the IPCC review process to frustrate an FOI request follows naturally from the their behaviour in manipulating the peer review process. What else could they have done, given that they were in fact manipulating that process?
The “attempts to prevent sientific data being released” are nowhere near as dramatic as they look. As far as I can make out they were just trying to avoid ridicule for how hopeless their data curation practices were. A pathetic confirmation of egomania bringing them undone but nothing to do with actually faking the results or with the overall conclusions.
I doubt that climate scientists have been a high proportion of the rent seekers buzzing around to “crisis” conferences. Seems to be mainly “environmentalists”, “green entrepreneurs” and the usual gang.
What remains puzzling is the willingness of governments to appease fundamentally irrational economic policies (irrational on the assumption that AGW is proved). Best theory I’ve heard (I think from Spiked) is that it started way back with the Thatcher Government’s campaign to defeat the unions by reducing British dependence on coal. Certainly the UK Government has led the charge. There’s also a general push to reduce dependence on oil. Still doesn’t satisfactorily explain how far its gone, given the ability of coal and oil interests to fight back.
The widespread suggestions of “hoax” are a product of the same kind of irrationality that promotes irrational policies to deal with the issue in the first place. We need to promote rationality not side with one form of hysteria against another.
comment #122 in the thread arthur refers to is worth reading too
The way I have thought about it is that the core belief of sustainability is flawed in that historically the climate has always varied dramatically in the longer term – irrespective of the magnitude of AGW are humans at the stage of being able to control the environment? I think that would be a good point to discuss.
Seems clear that there is a sentiment of fear that humanity could be affecting the environment. Gives rise to denials that we are presumably based on the same underlying dismay.
Would be surprising if we weren’t affecting the climate. The panic about that seems to relate to a sense of powerlessness and fragility.
Equally obviously we’ve learned to cope with climate changing and can already change the planet far faster than nature can. That in itself is fearful to those with a program of humbly bowing before nature.
Suspect the sense of fragility and powerlessness is related to not yet being unable to control our own social relations and the reality that most of us “only work here” and in that sense really are “powerless”.
If there was a speeded up climate change we would have to do something – either to adapt to it or to control it. We would obviously have decades or centuries in which to do it, during which social and technological changes as dramatic as those in earlier centuries would still be the most noticeable changes.
There is no way we could instead adapt ourselves and our mode of production to NOT being a species that changes its environment, which is precisely what the green religion is demanding instead of confidence in adaptation, technological development and geoengineering.
So perhaps there is a sense of panic connected with knowing that the demands being made to stop changing nature cannot be achieved.
Arthur has nailed the real issue with climate change – the rate of change is important. If it is slow enough we will be able to adapt, if it is too fast we will be in a lot of trouble.
Time will tell. All this stuff about who did what to whom is irrelevant to the facts on the ground.
However it is rather fun to see both the denialists and the faith based fear mongers in such a tizz.
Dalec
I am transferring my own post “at greens taking a few hits” from oct 31
The greens are the reactionaries of our time.
They lie and exagerate every aspect of climate change in order to drive us back to pre industrial time.
these are useful links to further examine the facts
http://www.climateaudit.org/
http://www.climatedepot.com/
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
http://greenhousebullcrap.bigblog.com.au/index.do
http://antigreen.blogspot.com/
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/
to summarize the science a doubling of CO2 will increase temperature about .7 C and not 4C the IPCC tell us about.
AS actual CO2 levels are currently below IPCC predictions made 10 years ago a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere may not even be possible as CO2 does not just stay in the air but gets absorbed by oceans , soil , plants and trees , coral etc etc. Remembering that oil and coal is finite and according to some we are half way through our oil.
Slightly warmer temperatures will be beneficial.
Just ask the russians and canadians.
Food production will increase especially because of the higher CO2 levels . Some farmers currently pump CO2 into their greenhouse to dramatically lift production.
Currently the only people standing up to green fanatics are the consevatives . I hope all this helps
Faith based “science”.
There is a strong similarity between the response of what I call “faith based” supporters of GW and the response of Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus and Francis Galton to Evolutionary theory.
These people seized upon Charles Darwins work to push reactionary social theories. They were intellectual parasites.
This appropriation has had no impact at all on the scientific truth of Darwins work.
The problem for the denialists is that they are now attacking the parasites in the GW debate. Waste of time. The underlying truth of the science will remain no matter how many parasites they bring down.
The group currently copping it aren’t just parasites in the field but widely respected leading authors. They may or may not be the worst examples of enforcing “official science” but they have been able to be at the center of it because they are among the leaders in central aspects of climate science (especially paleoclimatology) and have been able to manipulate the peer review process because they ARE the leading authorities.
They certainly are not atypical in the degree to which they have spoken out ignorantly on policy and economic measures lending “their scientific authority” to fundamentally irrational advocacy of sustainability etc. Any public “debate” would not be about “the science” if so many of “the scientists” had not joined in outright panic mongering.
There is nothing to panic about in this or any other issue that Greenies take up.
Greenie panic mongering is usually treated with appropriate scepticism but has been far more effective when dishonestly backed and promoted by “reputatable” (and leading) scientists.
For anyone wanting a quick look without too much detail:
1. Highlights of HARRY_READ_ME.txt
2. A reasonably balanced assessment from a climate scientist,Judy Curry. She emphasizes need for a greater transparency and an end to tribal wagon circling (with implications for cleaning up IPCC peer review process). I would add that they also need to stop misusing “the science” when participating in policy debates as citizens with exactly the same expertize on what, if anything, should be done about AGW as anybody else.
3. Background on the FOI obstruction The documents also bring out, though the commentary doesn’t acknowledge, that the “wagon circling” was encouraged by the nature of hostile attacks and that actual scientific replication is done by independent studies rather than relying on (desirable) transparent cooperation in providing data and code. Also neither documents nor commentary grasps the implications of HARRY_READ_ME.txt that their data and code was in such a mess that they couldn’t have been transparent if they had wanted to me and resorted to bluster to cover that up outside the tribe.
4. Direct links to a longer list of emails that have been widely bloviated about.
Umm the link for 1 was:
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/11/climate-fraud-smoking-guns-highlights.html
Arthur,
Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus and Francis Galton were eminent scientists of their time, this did not stop them bending Darwins work to their ideological preferences. In this sense they were parasitic.
Lord Kelvin was totally wrong about the age of the solar system but we owe him a huge debt for his other work. Eminence is no protection aganst error.
In my view, and I suspect yours too, the underlying physics of CO2 forcing in the earths atmosphere are well understood and non contentious.
The climate system is immensely complex and impossible to model in detail. This leaves a lot of room for ideological bias from all perspectives; from the Christian right to the ultra greens to the self styled true leftists and of course the denialists. All these groups with the exception of the ultra greens want to maintain the status quo in power generation, transport and manufacture. The fact that the present technological base for these things is over 100 years old and hopelessly inefficient in energy and emissions terms seems to escape them.
It is moribund capitalist production.
Basically this what the denialists are supporting.
Whatever happened to modernism?
Dalec
Dalek’s concept of “modernism” is to retreat from the coal mining that displaced earlier sources of base load primary energy during the 18th century industrial revolution to one or other of those earlier sources such as geothermal, windmills, watermills etc (or even more bizarrely magically displacing primary by secondary energy, ie batteries, with solar!).
History plays funny tricks so one cannot absolutely rule out some future technological development making one or other of these obsoleted technologies more viable than coal – especially if necessary R&D for future technologies continues to be fettered by capitalist relations of production, while coal mining gets more expensive. But neither Dalek nor other Greenies seriously expect that – they rely instead on state intervention to make coal more expensive as part of a program actually aimed at retreating from modernity entirely.
A modernist approach looks forward to technologies that could eventually be cheaper than coal. Nuclear fission is nowhere near it yet but a lot more plausible than others in the medium term. Fusion looks a better bet for the long term, but its certainly decades away.
We won’t know what future technology will bring without massive resources diverted to basic science and R&D. Greenies, fearing the future, seek instead to cramp our energy production and consumption and hence all our production and consumption within the limits of what their premodern imaginations can cope with – and somehow hope to force people in developing countries to not even strive for the pathetically low standards achieved long ago in developed countries.
As for “agreeing”, the only point of agreement I can see is that “the climate system is immensely complex and impossible to model in detail”. The people pretending otherwise are still using Fortran 66 code organized around (punched card) “decks” to maintain their traditions
Kerry has just drawn my attention to the “Manchester Manifesto” Who Owns Science
Its nicely timed to coincide with “Climategate” proving abuse of “Intellectual Property” to protect scientific tribalism.
While very moderately worded it has a suitably extensive list of signatories to stimulate discussion that will inevitably hook up with the more aggressive (and widely supported) Free and Open Source Software movement that confront the same problem in engineering (and hence in everything) and related “Open Culture” movements (wikipedia etc) etc that link directly to mass rejection of property rights in music, video and games by file sharing.
I’ve always thought (eg with “Software Liberation” in early 1980s) that this stuff is central to linking communist ideas about capitalist relations of production fettering the productive forces to practical political struggles.
There’s also a possible opening in Australia at the moment with a transparently silly scheme likely to go through against opposition from Nationals, Liberals and Greens, none of whom have the slightest credibility.
How about (seriously) proposing that they should offer an “alternative” of Australia spending as much on science and R&D towards cheaper base load primary energy as other countries do on restricting carbon emissions, with no IP rights as that would only hinder our contribution to the common world effort to “do something” but we would prefer to do something “actually useful”. Spin-offs to Australia instead of IP are a generally higher tech workforce like the spin-off to US from military and (related) space programs.
Suggest starting a new topic for this (instead of emailing links while supposedly running a blog and despite no supporting web site).
Arthur, I like your proposal very much, especially the way it connects the Intellectual Property issue (how private ownership holds back development) to the broad concern about climate change. And I like the way in which the proposal seeks a way of ‘doing something’ that is progressive, expansionary of human endeavour, material standards and quality of life, rather than reactionary and restrictive. It offers an alternative to both the alarmists and those who are absolutely certain that human activity does not, cannot, influence the natural environment.
For what it’s worth, I drafted a letter, quickly, and sent it to various daily newspapers in Australia. It may be that it will appear over the next day or two but, today, it appeared in The Canberra Times http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/letters/general/letters-to-the-editor/1690768.aspx?storypage=0 (Will need to scroll down). It reads:
“Dear Editor,
A progressive alternative to a carbon tax, and to state intervention to make coal more expensive, would be for the Australian government to start spending as much on science and R&D towards the goal of cheaper base-load primary energy as other countries do on restricting carbon emissions. Intellectual Property rights should be suspended as part of this radical approach as private ownership of science and technology only hinders our contribution to the common world effort to ‘do something’. The Rudd government has increased funding for science and innovation but it still remains laughably low. The aim should be to improve material living standards and to make everything cheaper, not restrictions to make everything unnecessarily more expensive. Climate may get warmer or cooler, and carbon based fuels will eventually become more expensive due to gradual depletion of their cheapest sources. The way ahead is not with subsidized solar panels and medieval wind-mills but with vastly increased investment in science and R&D into geo-engineering and fusion energy”.
No doubt the phrasing could be better, but I just had a moment to actually do it.
Coincidentally, last night on SBS-TV, there was a documentary about fusion energy, which was hosted by Professor Brian Cox, who is a strong advocate for it. I only caught the last half of the doco but it was very informative and persuasive. Cox emphasized the amazing potential of fusion energy, on one hand, and the lack of anywhere-near adequate funding for it, on the other. He said that in the UK more is spent on mobile phone ‘ring tones’ each year than on research into fusion energy.
The documentary had the wonderful ttile: “Can we make a star on earth?”
It’s clear that we can but many more billions will be needed to be invested and this makes much more sense than, as Arthur put it, continuing to just spend them on restricting carbon emissions.
Here’s the SBS program guide synopsis of the documentary:
“Can the energy source that powers the sun solve the threat of climate change? Professor Brian Cox takes a global journey in search of the energy source of the future. Called nuclear fusion, it is the process that fuels the sun and every other star in the universe. Yet despite over five decades of effort, scientists have been unable to get even a single watt of fusion electricity onto the grid. (From the UK in English) (Documentary)”
arthur referred to judith curry’s “circling the wagons” statements about CRU above wrt how scientists ought to conduct themselves
Her latest thoughts on climate gate: an inconvenient provocateur is probably the best summation of the whole saga