http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=7999

I found this excellent little CATO Institute debate somewhere in my Twitter stream, and I watched the whole of it, despite the annoying accents and speaking styles of the speakers, and the insider economics references to Pigou and Coase (they’re only theorems, you know).

I thought that Kate Gordon made some excellent rebuttals to Andrew Morriss’ whining, pedantic free marketeering, and I was with her right up until the last few frames when she said that the Center for American Progress, of course, supports a carbon tax, as this is, of course, the best way to prevent Carbon Dioxide emissions.

Such disappointment ! To find that somebody so intelligent cannot see the limitations of carbon pricing is a real let down. I tend to find that American “progressives” on the whole are rather wedded to this notion of environmental taxation, “internalising the externalities” – adding the damages from industrial activities into the cost of the industrial products. I do not see any analysis of the serious flaws in this idea. Just what are they drinking ? What’s in the Kool-Aid ?

1. Carbon Dioxide is a virtual, negative commodity

You burn some fossil fuels. It makes light, heat and steam to generate electricity. Brilliant ! Virtually the whole economy runs off of burning dead critters and pondweed from millions of years ago. Talk about recycling !

Problem : the colourless, odourless carbon dioxide gas that’s thrown off during the oxidation (burning) adds to the Earth’s Greenhouse Effect, and the quantities are creating a serious imbalance in atmospheric heat containment.

You can value a stable climate, but you can’t put a price on carbon dioxide – it has (virtually) no chemical, agricultural, engineering or infrastructure value, so who wants to buy it ? Let’s re-phrase that – who wants to pay an additional fee to burn fossil fuels ? Fossil fuels are becoming more and more costly to dig/drill/mine out of the ground – the economy cannot accept the burden of a carbon tax in addition.

Nobody wants to pay for a virtual commodity – hence the moves for global carbon finance are failing – nobody wants to pay into the Climate Finance Fund pot. It’s just like International Development, very few countries are anywhere near the aid contribution levels that will deliver the Millenium Development Goals. And nobody will pay Ecuador to save its rainforest from oil exploitation, sorry “exploration”.

2. A carbon price will never be paid by the polluting industries

The fossil fuel extraction and distribution industries are directly responsible for the global warming side effect of their products, but a carbon tax won’t touch them. A carbon tax or any other form of carbon pricing will slip down the value chain to the end consumers – downstream to the energy service and fuel customers.

Therefore, carbon pricing will never incentivise the polluting industries to change their business models – they’ll just pass the costs on, energy becomes more expensive and even though the poorer will buy less, the rich will carry on consuming. Carbon pricing is therefore regressive, inegalitarian, fostering greater division in society, and not actually tackling the problem of how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Large oil and gas companies like BP, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil regularly line up in support of carbon pricing, carbon trading or carbon taxation. They know full well that their businesses will carry on extracting, even with carbon pricing in place. Carbon pricing won’t touch their profit margins.

Some people show surprise that large oil and gas companies support carbon pricing. Me, I just reason that carbon pricing will add to the inflationary pressure on energy costs, which will lead to aggressive profit-seeking in energy companies. To my mind, carbon pricing will enable higher energy costs and higher energy profits which will finance the drilling of less accessible places and the continued exploitation and desecration of places such as Canada’s First Nation interior, Latin American rainforest and African coasts.

Energy will get more expensive with carbon pricing, making it imperative that more pristine habitats will be exploited and polluted – because it’s cheaper to rampage over poor, unindustrialised countries, and too costly to clean up. Carbon pricing won’t save the planet – it will exacerbate its ruination. Carbon pricing won’t even lock down and diminish carbon dioxide emissions – people will continue to buy energy, and the companies will continue to supply it, from the same old fossil fuel paradigm.

Tell me, honestly, have environmental taxation and envirocrime fines ever really stopped the offending behaviour in the past ? BP paid for Deepwater Horizon, but now they and their “competitors” are moving on to mine the Arctic.

3. The School of Economics with its sleight-of-hand tricks won’t stop carbon dioxide – only regulation can

New Jersey Governor Christie has pulled out of the RGGI – the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative – trying to do Cap and Trade in several US States. Why ? Because Cap and Trade cannot work. Too much of the economy is invested in carbon. You cannot apply a “marginal” re-orientation tariff scheme to a major pillar of the economy. Cap and Trade can work for things like fluorinated chemicals (the Montreal Protocol) because they are easily substitutable and therefore not essential to the running of the economy.

What the economists tell you won’t work. You cannot cap carbon dioxide emissions by general dictat and pricing – you need to be more clever and go for the roots of the problem.

Here’s a parallel example. Why is there so much plastic waste ? Why so much landfill ? Because people throw plastic away. And why do people throw plastic away ? Because plastic is packaging. And why is plastic used for packaging ? Because it is made from cheap feedstock waste from the petroleum refining and chemical industries. And so how do we stop plastic waste ? Putting a price on it ? We already pay the price by having to pay town and district taxes to clean up the waste and dispose of it. But paying for plastic pollution doesn’t stop the problem. How do we stop so much plastic becoming environmental waste ? Go to the root, the source of the problem. Make it a legal requirement for all plastic goods and plastic product packaging to be biodegradable, made from plant sources (or as a second best, fully recyclable).

The best way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is to become less wasteful with energy. And the best way to stimulate energy efficiency is regulation.

We need regulation and enforcement to ensure that all energy appliances and energy-using products, such as cars, are efficient.

We need regulation and enforcement to make sure that all major energy users, and public services, such as street lighting, office facilities and hospitals, are making the most efficient use of energy.

We need regulation and enforcement to ensure that procurement along each public (state) and private contractual supply chain is the most energy efficient and least energy-wasting it can be.

We need regulation and enforcement to prevent the insanity of the global food and goods supply chain – locally sourced should have preference over globally sourced.

We need regulation and enforcement to increase the proportion of energy that comes from truly sustainable and renewable sources.

Renewable energy is set to become cheaper and more prolific. It will win in the end. Give green a chance.

4. Break the link between energy sales and profits

While energy remains a positively valued commodity, carbon dioxide will always retain a negative value.

Energy should come to be regarded as a utility again, not as a commodity. Energy should be a public service, not the profit centre of private enterprise.

Companies shouldn’t win profits by selling more and more energy. They also shouldn’t win profits by forcing the costs of energy to rise.

Energy should have price control.

Energy services should make profits for companies, not energy sales.

5. Carbon Trading between North and South can only constitute a minute fraction of the global economy

All those economists who think that a major market in carbon can be created out of thin, hot air, are naive to the point of stupidity, in my view.

Real emissions cuts have to take place in industrialised countries – they cannot be offset by outsourcing to China or India.

6. Dream the impossible dream

Of all the things to fight for, carbon pricing is not only the farthest from reach, but also the thing that most people will obviously fight over. It really is an impossible dream to think that the world would ever reach a consensus over pricing Greenhouse Gas emissions. Piecemeal, unilateral action won’t work – only a global deal could create a “level playing field” between polluting and non-polluting forms of energy. A global deal cannot be reached – at least not in a hurry – so it won’t happen in the timeframe we have.

Carbon Trading is not working.
Cap and Trade is not working.
Cap and Anything is not working.
Climate Finance is not working.
Carbon Pricing is not working.
Carbon Taxation is not working.

Supply me with examples that contradict my claims and I will write them up and apologise on bended knee. Seriously. I will supply photographic evidence.

Stop listening to economists. Start thinking about sensible ways to reduce energy waste.

See the rest of Gaddafi’s speech to the United Nations here

When did Colonel Muammar Gaddafi learn of threats from the world’s major oil consumer countries against his rule ? Was it in early 2011 ? Or was it several years earlier ? On the public stage, he has been deliberately reduced to a figure of fun, and his message advising non-aggression and protection from aggression is being lost. He is now a desperate man :-

http://www.youtube.com/?v=DTjpdUiILDw

Like me, you may have noticed that what Gaddafi is currently saying is not reported in the world’s media. Why is that ? We hear enough from the United States of America, the United Kingdom and key members of the United Nations Security Council and NATO. Why don’t we hear the voice of the leader of Libya ? What does Gaddafi want ? What does he think of the situation ? Is his message so diametrically different to the narrative of the warmongers of the West that it cannot be relayed, or we would all collapse down the rabbit hole of cognitive dissonance ?

And why am I writing about this ? What has the fate of Gaddafi and Gaddafi’s version of Libyan governance got to do with energy ? It’s quite straight-forward really. It has come to light that the United Kingdom, my own country, was engaged in “grasping diplomacy” on behalf of privatised energy company BP in the run up to the 2003 Iraq War. Essentially, the invasion of Iraq was treated as a foregone conclusion, months before the big public outcry against it. And energy companies were already vying for a slice of the action in post-war Iraq, even before the public relations case for war was being made :-

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/secret-memos-expose-link-between-oil-firms-and-invasion-of-iraq-2269610.html

“Five months before the March 2003 invasion [of Iraq], Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq’s enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair’s military commitment to US plans for regime change. The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP’s behalf because the oil giant feared it was being “locked out” of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms. Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: “Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis.” The minister then promised to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on her lobbying efforts. The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq “post regime change”. Its minutes state: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.” After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office’s Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: “Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future… We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq.” Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had “no strategic interest” in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was “more important than anything we’ve seen for a long time”. BP was concerned that if Washington allowed TotalFinaElf’s existing contact with Saddam Hussein to stand after the invasion it would make the French conglomerate the world’s leading oil company. BP told the Government it was willing to take “big risks” to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world. Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002. The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq’s reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.”

Think of that when you consider the belligerent tone being used in connection with Libya. Why does the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 only get interpreted in warmongering terms ? Where are the options besides military options ? Where’s the diplomacy ?

The mainstream media are engaged in the propagation of military aggression, without analysing why war is in the UK’s national energy interest, or rather, in the interest of BP and other energy companies whose interests intersect with those of the British Government :-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13112559

It is natural to ask the obvious question…if oil and gas companies were collaborating with the UK Government prior to the Unjustified Military Aggression on Iraq (commonly known as the “Iraq War”), what are they doing in regards to Libya ?

Libya was planning to re-nationalise its energy resources, and I mean nationalise – apparently Gaddafi was planning for a redistribution of wealth exercise :-

http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/crimes/25-03-2011/117336-reason_for_war_oil-0/

“On February 16, 2009, Gaddafi took a step further and called on Libyans to back his proposal to dismantle the government and to distribute the oil wealth directly to the 5 million inhabitants of the country.”

And the oil and gas companies were fearful of what this could mean for their future business profits :-

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/67d1d02a-5314-11e0-86e6-00144feab49a.html#axzz1JxjVwP40

“Oil companies fear nationalisation in Libya : By Sylvia Pfeifer and Javier Blas in London : Published: March 20 2011 22:22 : Western oil companies operating in Libya have privately warned that their operations in the country may be nationalised if Colonel Muammer Gaddafi’s regime prevails. Executives, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the rapidly moving situation, believe their companies could be targeted, especially if their home countries are taking part in air strikes against Mr Gaddafi. Allied forces from France, the UK and the US on Saturday unleashed a series of strikes against military targets in Libya. “It is certainly a concern. There are good reserves there,” said one executive at a western oil company with operations in Libya. “We have lost some of our production [because all operations have stopped] but our bigger concern is what will happen to the exploratory work as that gives you a future rather than the immediate impact,” he added…”

Don’t tell me this issue wasn’t considered well before Spring 2011 :-

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/events/view/-/id/1555/

“Libya’s Energy Future : Tuesday 20 July 2010 : Location : Chatham House, London : To mark the publication of African Energy’s newly updated report Libya’s Energy Future and associated The Libya Oil and Gas Handbook, publisher Cross-border Information Ltd (CbI) and Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme (MENAP) are jointly holding this seminar to discuss the issues raised by the report. Topics to be covered in the seminar will include: Qadhafi family politics, reform or reaction, key institutions, finance and investment, energy policy, local content and Qadhafi and the world…”

http://www.businessinsider.com/libya-courts-oil-and-gas-investors-but-faces-a-tough-sell-following-recent-government-fiascos-2010-2

“More than two-dozen companies from around the world are betting on Libya these days, said Ronald Bruce St John, an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, a Washington-based think tank. He has served on the international advisory board of the Journal of Libyan Studies and the Atlantic Council Working Group on Libya. The government of Muammar Gaddafi has relied on foreigners to scout for new wells and bolster current production, “if they’re ever going to come close” to a target of three million barrels a day, he explained. The burning question, though, is “how profitable would it be” for an overseas oil concern to forge ahead in the country’s hit-or-miss exploration climate, a situation made even more dicey by Tripoli’s erratic policy moves, St John told OilPrice.com. Libya’s national oil company chief has talked about the need for foreign investment over the last few years, he noted, but this time Ghanem’s words follow months of government bungling and less-than-stunning results in the oil and gas fields. One of last year’s biggest shocks was Gaddafi’s suggestion to nationalize the country’s oil and gas interests, a consideration that seemed to echo the early days of the Libyan revolution when the industry was partially nationalized. These words set the stage for the National Oil Corp. to renegotiate long-term contracts in Libya’s favor with major oil companies operating in the country, such as Italy’s ENI, the United States’ Occidental, PetroCanada, France’s Total and Spain’s Repsol, St John added. International investors were also a little unnerved by the Verenex Energy Inc. fiasco, St John added. He said the small Canadian oil exploration player was the only company to make a sizeable discovery – more than two billion barrels of oil – under strict EPSA, phase four, contracts awarded after 2005. But Libya’s interference in negotiations between Verenex and the China National Petroleum Co. over the sale of the Canadian firm’s exploration contract drove down Verenex’s share price by 30 percent and forced it to sell the contract to Libya at 70 percent of the original offer to China, he said…”

In the last couple of years, seismic and other surveys of Libyan oil and gas fields, both on- and offshore have led to high hopes for the country’s future production capability. Where the fossil fuels are, there the industrial vultures gather :-

http://www.offshore-technology.com/news/news110888.html
http://www.energy-pedia.com/article.aspx?articleid=144591
http://www.narg.org.uk/exploration/news/#aeromag
http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9020830&contentId=7038591
“Libya : A Commanding Presence on the World Stage” (download)

My conclusion is that the international oil companies – including BP – are attempting to wrest ownership of Libyan oil and gas resources for the future of their business profitability. They could only do this if they were in cahoots with the governments of the industrialised countries of the world, who they have such a symbiotic relationship with, and who they can offer energy security to, in exchange for the spoils of war in Libya.

The evidence reported by The Independent newspaper confirms that there is an ongoing hidden alliance between the energy companies and the UK Government.

The way it seems to me, the international oil and gas companies have used the excuse of civil disruption as a cover to pull out of the country in an attempt to blackmail Libya over fossil fuel resource contracts :-

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/21/us-bp-libya-idUSTRE71K1CG20110221

Who cares about a short stoppage of oil and gas from Libya while the regime is “cured” of its current leadership incumbent ? The downturn in supplies from Libya were partly compensated for by extra production from Saudi Arabia :-

(although Saudi Arabia cannot keep up higher levels of production forever).

The long game is control over Libya’s oil and gas supplies to the benefit of the rich, industrialised nations, and the deprivation of the economies of Africa.

The future could be so much better. We can get energy from Libyan desert solar power, we don’t need to destroy the country for the last drops of global oil and gas.

Give peace a chance.

I don’t know about you, but I’m missing David Miliband from the political fish-eat-fish top table already.

If he were to ask me, which he won’t, but anyway, if he did, I would recommend that he starts reading up about Energy production and supply, over the next 18 months or so before he gets invited, acceptingly, back into the Shadow Cabinet of the UK Government.

If he were to spend his time on the train between South Shields and Westminster looking into energy security matters, into crustal petrogeology, the Middle East oil fields, Wind Power, solar and marine options, he could make a strong comeback into the limelight – as opposed to the “lemon” light he’s been cast into, thrust into, so far.

If he becomes acquainted with the ways and wiles of engineering and fossil fuels over the next few years, the viability of Renewable Energy solutions, the transport explosion phenomenon and how to control it, then he will be able to offer solid assistance to his younger brother Teddy – who appears to be mistakenly sold on the idea of new nuclear power.

And if Ed Miliband were to ask, (again, which he won’t), I’d say – atomic energy cannot save us; carbon capture technology cannot save us; algae biodiesel can only trickle, even Frankenstein GM algae biodiesel; Peak Oil is almost definitely here; efficiency of use alone cannot save us. We have to go right out for a non-combustion, Renewable Energy future.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/20/climate-change-negotiations-failure

“…The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now expects from December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don’t want to be associated with failure, they don’t want to pour time and energy into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome…”

Copenhagen was never seriously going to deliver, and I don’t think most of the protesters on the streets in Copenhagen thought so. Activist demands, including from activist nations, were always going to be ignored, The solutions really didn’t come to the conference, and the problems really lay elsewhere.

But there’s no need to utterly despair, George !

You ask, “Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it’s dead : The collapse of the talks at Copenhagen took away all momentum for change and the lobbyists are back in control. So what next?”, and the two most obvious things to say are :-

a. The media have failed the public.

b. The big institutions working on global issues, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, have failed to perceive and deflect political attacks.

David Cromwell and David Edwards of MediaLens write :-

http://www.medialens.org/board/

http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1285056426.html

“Re: The battle against climate change is now over. Climate change won. : Posted by The Editors on September 21, 2010, 9:07 am, in reply to “The battle against climate change is now over. Climate change won.” : Monbiot: “To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power – acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won’t. They weren’t ever going to do so. So what do we do now?”. We turn on the corporate media that are a huge part of this problem. The attitude of the Greens to the media has always been pitiful. Time and again groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Green Party have told us, ‘We have to maintain good relations with the media.’ But if the world is sleeping, the mainstream media is the great corporate sandman. It really is time to wake up about that. Working through the media does not work. Eds”

Declaring war on the media is quite a bold call. A great number of people straddle and cross the boundaries between science communications and media. Should we ask everyone to step outside the publishing house circus ?

And would we see a different flavour from the writings of those such as Richard Black and Roger Harrabin if they were to quit the BBC ?

Is George Monbiot’s position compromised by continuing to write for The Guardian ? This is a question that has been posed by MediaLens contributors in the past.

Opinion is varied on that. But what is clear is that new non-traditional organisations have the opportunity to take on the role of being the best communicators on Climate Change.

Trouble is, currently that’s mostly the sceptic-deniers. But that could change, and that is maybe what George Monbiot could promote – New Media on accurate Climate Change Science reporting.

George, George, you wonderfully caring fellow, you should keep your spirits up – there are masses of people out there, all over the world, planting trees, growing organic crops, cycling their whole lives, building sustainably and putting up wind turbines – bypassing the politicking and posturing on Climate Change policy and just getting on with the things that need to be done. Quite economically beneficial, too, sometimes.

Get back your positive perspective, George, do. Chin up, old man !

Come, call with us for a truly sustainable media, outside the press barons’ nosebags and troughs. Let us tell the whole, unwholesome, worrisome narrative of the Climate Change Science, and let’s make Climate Change policy a voting-worthy issue !

Don’t worry. This isn’t a threat, Andrew. It’s a invitation. When the rocket stoves have been lit and the canvas staked out, you’re invited to come and talk with real people about the realities of Climate Change instead of being cooped up with your hot laptop at home cooking up hurtful and inaccurate things to say about working Scientists and activists.

By the way, I rocked with laughter at this recent review of your book “The Hockey Stick Illusion” :-

http://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=357:reviews&catid=36:volume-6-issue-3-2010&Itemid=85

THE HOCKEY STICK ILLUSION

A.W. Montford
STACEY INTERNATIONAL, £10.99 PP482 ISBN 9781906768355

The ‘hockey stick’ is a graph showing the Earth’s temperature relatively constant for the past thousand years but then, like a hockey stick’s blade, rising sharply from about 1900 when human-induced greenhouse gas emissions seriously kicked in. But according to A.W. Montford’s “definitive exposé”, it’s just not true.

The captain of the ‘Hockey Team’, Montford writes, is the renowned American climatologist, Michael Mann, and at least forty-two named co-conspirators, all acclaimed scientists. Their motivation?

To keep the hockey-stick’s handle long and flat. Why? Because “the flatter the representation [before the upward swing]… the scarier were the conclusions”.

To generate the scare, and with it, win grant-grubbing political prestige, the scientists on the ‘Hockey Team’ had to massage out the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) – an epoch that lasted 300 years until 1250, when Vikings swashbuckled Greenland and wine from home-grown grapes swilled the manor halls of England.

Had the MWP been left in, claims Montford, the temperature curve for the past millennium would look more U-shaped. This would have diminished the case for human-induced global warming, obviating the urgency to discomfort ourselves by cutting CO2 emissions.

Montford claims that the MWP was airbrushed out by cherry-picking and statistically steamrollering tree-ring data – one of the proxies used to reconstruct past planetary temperatures. Leaked East Anglia emails clinch the case. Bottom line: the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate has “proven itself to be corrupt, biased and beset by conflicts of interest…. There is no conceivable way that politicians can justify this failing to their electorates. They have no choice but to start again.”

But who is Montford, and what are his sources?

Andrew Montford is a chartered accountant with a BSc in chemistry from St Andrews University. Based in Edinburgh, he is better known as the pseudonymous blogger, Bishop Hill – self-described as “the dissentient afflicted with the malady of thought”.

His book’s opening paragraph tells how he learned the intricacies of climate science by reading Climate Audit – the blog of Canadian mining consultant, Steve McIntyre. He relates: “While some of the statistics was [sic] over my head … I wondered if my newly-found understanding of the debate would enable me to take on … a public duty to make the story more widely known.”

After posting a summary on the internet, “my sleepy and relatively obscure website [turned] into a hive of activity, with thirty thousand hits being received over the following three days … saying nice things about what I had written [and] even an attempt to use my article as a source document for Wikipedia.”

But McIntyre’s attack on Mann is strongly contested. A study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution concluded that McIntyre had overplayed his hand.

A German appraisal picked up “a glitch” but “found this glitch to be of very minor significance”. An investigation by the US National Academy of Sciences, according to a report in Nature, “essentially upholds Mann’s findings”. And a review this year by Mann’s own university exonerated him, not necessarily of all error (which is inevitable in fast-evolving scientific fields), but of “any wrongdoing”.

Even if Mann were guilty as charged by the climate change contrarians, the hockey stick has been replicated by at least a dozen other studies. Above all, the MWP is probably a red herring. Its warming effect was probably more regional than global.

A parallel would be our past winter which was exceptionally cold regionally in Europe, but globally the hottest that NASA has ever recorded.

Montford’s analysis might cut the mustard with tabloid intellectuals but not with most scientists. Credibility counts. Mann has published over a hundred relevant contributions to scholarly journals compared, seemingly, with McIntyre, three, and Montford, nil. Meanwhile, Mann and his colleagues get on with refining their methods and datasets, publishing in such world-renowned journals such as Nature and Science.

The Hockey Stick Illusion might serve a psychological need in those who can’t face their own complicity in climate change, but at the end of the day it’s exactly what it says on the box: a write-up of somebody else’s blog.

At best it will help to keep already-overstretched scientists “on their toes”. At worst, it’s a yapping terrier worrying the bull; it cripples action, potentially costing lives and livelihoods.

Alastair McIntosh

Alastair McIntosh is a lovely man. I met him and his wife last year, and he is completely trustworthy. You do need to pay attention to what he says.

For a complete analysis of your work, see here :-

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/

Andrew, why are you so unfaithful to Chemistry ? Didn’t you learn about the vibrational modes of gas molecules ? Don’t you know how electromagnetic radiation interacts with matter ?

Please read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report. It’s free and available online. Get the true picture :-

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.htm

You’ve got no excuse now. All the facts are in front of you. You need to start to digest them. Then you’ll be ready for your fireside chat with the Scientists and Engineers at Climate Camp when you get the courage to get on down there.

Dear Steve,

Following Dr Judith Curry’s appeal on ClimateProgress regarding the recent RealClimate post from Tamino, that Joe Romm, and all of us, should be reading your work, I decided to take a brief look at your output on ClimateAudit in order to see what all the fuss from Judith Curry was about :-

http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/25/hockey-stick-real-climate-montford-judith-curry-tamino-gavin-schmid/

“19. Judith Curry says: July 25, 2010 at 9:19 pm : …So if any of you have actually read as much as I have on this topic including Montford’s [Bishop Hill] book and the climateaudit threads particularly McIntyre’s most recent post, well then we might have something to talk about. Otherwise, we can just sit back and all be entertained by tribalistic wardances.”

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/

“107. Judith Curry says: 23 July 2010 at 12:44 PM : Once more people have read the [Montford, Bishop Hill] book, and if Montford and McIntyre were welcomed to participate in the discussion, then I would be interested in participating in a more detailed discussion on this.”

Now, I’m not going to get into the numeric, statistical or Scientific details of your posts, as that is the very thing that you want your readers to do, it seems.

Your goal, as it appears to me, is to create a flurry of contention and get people distracted by arguments over mere dots and dashes, thereby derailing their personal progress in understanding Climate Change Science.

I don’t understand why you insist on raising a duststorm over aspects of Climate Change Science. Your motives are hidden from me. What I do comprehend are the techniques that you are using to stir up chaos.

You may have some valid points to make about the Science, the numbers, the charts, the trends and the statistics, but your methods are those of a propagandist, first and foremost, and it appears you won’t let the facts get in the way of kicking off a good fist-fight.

This means that you are not acting like a genuine sceptic (skeptic), or even a denier on Climate Change. Your approach makes you more like an obstructer, a delayer, holding back the general public’s growing awareness of Climate Change Science, and in come cases, holding back scientists from doing their work.

As I have just said, I am not going to go into the Science details on your recent post. However, I am going to make general comments on your style, tone, use of language and what appear to be your obsessions.

http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/25/repost-of-tamino-and-the-magic-flute/

“Re-post of “Tamino and the Magic Flute” : Tamino’s realclimate post re-states points that I’ve discussed at length in the past. Here is a re-posting of a 2008 post on Tamino that deals with most of the issues in his realclimate post…”

http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/25/the-team-defends-paleo-phrenology/

“The Team Defends Paleo-Phrenology : Hansen’s twin pit bulls, Tamino and Gavin, have launched into a spirited defence of Mannian paleo-phrenology at realclimate here, with a counter-discussion at Bishop Hill here…”

1. Stop living in the past, Steve

I am amazed that you are still dragging up data and making accusations about dirt from Scientific discussions that are over a decade old !

The Science has moved on from 1998, as has the Climate, and you are displaying all the intelligence of a stubborn person in insisting that your points about the first “Hockey Stick” paper should still be endlessly discussed.

Your points, if they have had any validity, have been taken up and discussed, and then adopted or dispensed with, as appropriate. The majority of your criticisms have been answered, repeatedly. There’s no need to go dragging it all up again like a long-solved domestic dispute.

Endlessly sourcing people back to a diagram from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessment report from 1990 and claiming that later reports are less accurate is like pointing people to Victorian diagrams of tropical plants and animals and saying that modern photographic imaging is less accurate.

There hasn’t been a “plot” to remove the “Medieval Warm Period” or the “Little Ice Age” – although Scientists now prefer the term “Medieval Climate Optimum” or “Medieval Climate Anomaly” to “Medieval Warm Period”.

2. Stop denigrating people who have good intentions and good training

Some of the language you use is what I would call “schoolmaster-ly” – what others could call patronising, hectoring, bullying or just plain rude.

It could be considered insulting that you keep berating experts in their fields of research because they don’t agree with your views on a very narrow selection of Science.

You appear to want to criticise the ethics and motivations of Climate Change Scientists, without any justification whatsoever. Some could call that slander, plain and simple. Personally, I would like to be more charitable than that, because somewhere in me I feel that you are doing what you do from the best possible intentions. But maybe not. Maybe your motivations are not as noble as you would like us to think.

3. What’s with the tree rings, Steve ?

Surely it’s about time you gave up your obsession with tree rings and statistical techniques ?

A reconstruction is a reconstruction. It can never be perfect, never 100% accurate.

The point of the temperature reconstructions of the last two thousand years (and beyond) is to establish that very recent Global Warming is anomalous, unprecedented.

And that is what has been demonstrated. Reliably :-

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/Mannetal08-PNAS-d/Mannetal08-Sep2-PNAS-2008-Mann-0805721105.pdf

Your real problem is probably with the idea that Climate Sensitivity is higher than claimed by Christopher Monckton.

Why don’t you admit that instead of obsessing about dendrochronology, statistical “fudges” and paleoclimatological theories ?

So far, you haven’t found any accepted way to counter the evidence that Global Warming in the very recent past is happening much faster than it should be from natural causes alone, given everything we now know about periods of Global Warming in the past (from studying proxy data for temperature). In addition, the global temperatures today are much higher than they have been in the last few thousand years.

Your position and the manner of your approach have been refuted and reproached many times. Why do persist in being such an unhappy grumbler ?

And why do you have to be so mean to Climate Change Scientists ? Why do you think you need to undermine their reputations with accusations about their professional conduct ? How many independent reviews and reports of academic professionalism do you want us to waste our time and resources with before you will grudgingly accept your accusations are unfounded ?

What about your own reputation ? Do you recognise that your recent involvement in Climategate has made many people conclude you are a meddling, malicious interferer ?

Even despite what some have termed your “bad behaviour”, you still might not be entirely wrong about Global Warming. There may be some good reason why Climate Sensitivity is not as high as the Scientific consensus calculates.

Now, if you were to be kind enough to go right away and produce a killer argument that doesn’t revolve around people getting worn out and fed up with answering your Freedom of Information requests, and being forced to defend their professional reputations from unwarranted attack, then people might start taking you seriously.

PLEASE IGNORE THE ADVERTISEMENT AT THE START OF THIS VIDEO. Video Credit : The Guardian

It’s great to see David Mitchell tucking into a big bite of the “Voluntary Behaviour Change” posse’s pie.

Let’s be honest : nobody wants to stop consuming and burning, but we’re going to have to if the Big Energy companies don’t change the way they provide us with power and fuel.

Yes, guilt is so old-fashioned. You can’t tell the public to change their consumption behaviour, trying to make them feel personally responsible for Climate Change, whilst still providing them with environmentally damaging products.

All electricity should be Renewable, all heating systems Carbon-neutral, all manufactured products Low Carbon.

Until that day, governments will continue to hire Public Relations consultants to convince the public to make different choices, and continue to fail to make any converts.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/default.stm

But it’s worse than merely embarrassing.

Entitled “How ‘climate-gate’ turned nasty”, it was a genuinely nasty piece of work in my view, showing images out of place, endorsing the work of non-experts, overlaying poor and inaccurate narration and editing interview comments inappropriately.

I feel that some of the mistakes made by the reporter, Tom Heap, were laughable.

I will mention just one thing here, out of all those that riled me. Several times during the programme, the “reporter” mentioned that Renewable Energy was expensive. At one point the film showed an offshore wind turbine and said that the electricity produced by wind power was three times more expensive than conventional sources.

He did not mention that the price of onshore wind power is comparable in price to fossil fuel generation but blocked by recalcitrant Planning authorities.

He didn’t mention that it is to be expected that Wind Power will be somewhat expensive at present – the investment phase in the new infrastructure is still ongoing.

He neglected to mention the high levels of return on investment, and solid asset base with continuing value, that a fully operational Wind Power network would provide, as outlined by the Offshore Valuation study :-

http://www.offshorevaluation.org

And he also neglected to mention that ongoing research and developing into Wind Power is dragging the prices down.

From this, I take it that the BBC can clearly not be trusted to provide accurate and complete information on the development of Renewable Energy.

As for the Science, I’ll probably get round to digging into this mess at some point, but one thing needs to be emphasised here : the views of John Christy and Bjoern Lomborg (a non-scientist) are at the very end of the spectrum.

Bjorn Lomborg’s work has been discredited, and he cannot be trusted in my view :-

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/06/the_lomborg_deception_1.php

John Christy has had to retract some of his scientific claims :-

http://climateprogress.org/2008/05/22/should-you-believe-anything-john-christy-or-roy-spencer-say/

They are in no way representative of the main caucus of Climate Change Science, and I feel it is extremely poor of the BBC to allow its viewers to be propagandised into believing that there is a serious debate about how significant and serious Climate Change is.

There isn’t. The governments of the world have invested public money in trying to find out the problems that could arise from Global Warming and the Climate Change it can cause, and the results are that we are at serious risk.

I think it is immoral and unethical to leave Panorama viewers with the idea that Climate Change might not be happening, or might not constitute a major threat to their way of life and the lives of those they care about.

In summary, I think the BBC cannot be trusted to relay Climate Change Science to us.

This bumbling attempt to cover all bases as if they were all relevant is going to confuse the public even more than they are already. The BBC is therefore complicit in mass deception, according to my analysis.

Oh, and Tom Heap, people breathing out Carbon Dioxide doesn’t add to the sum total of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere – it merely recycles it. On the other hand, digging up Fossil Fuels from the ground and burning them, they do increase the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air. How little you know about the basic science. You are in my humble opinion entirely unqualified to broadcast on Climate Change.

Once again, the Media have failed to communicate the facts.