http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/09/coalition-greatest-threat-to-environment

“This ‘greenest government ever’ is the greatest threat yet to our environment : The coalition is preparing to bin Britain’s climate change targets. After all, ministers have corporate sponsors to take care of : George Monbiot, guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 May 2011″

“…we should start considering other options for decarbonising the electricity supply: especially new nuclear technologies such as thorium, integral fast reactors or travelling wave reactors…”

“New”, George, “new” ? The only thing that’s “new” is the desperate rush to try Thorium power out, now that there are doubts about “classic” nuclear reactor design. Here’s what James Birkin has to say over at the Claverton forum, where they have real energy experts discussing Thorium reactors :-

https://groups.google.com/group/energy-discussion-group/browse_thread/thread/f0276e258b119a2c/47ac145d221a16fe?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=thorium# (Expand all)
From: James Birkin
Date: Sun, 8 May 2011
Subject: RE: FW: Thorium – the idea is growing!

…the technology is sufficiently advanced that one was built forty years ago.

People are embarking on building one (or have announced a target of 2015) in the last few days…

And as for whether Thorium nuclear power reactors are worth pursuing, well, take a look at a proper study, also mentioned in the Claverton Energy Research Group thread :-

From: Dave Elliott, Open University
Date: Sun, 08 May 2011
Subject: Re: Thorium – the idea is growing!

I’ve been following this debate and still find it odd that, while it’s said that we really need to hear from the experts, the evidence provided by the leading experts in the UK, the National Nuclear Labs, was treated as somehow suspect – presumably because they didn’t back Thorium.

http://www.nnl.co.uk/positionpapers

It is sadly easy to become convinced that something is the answer and then to see all counter views as evidence that the answer is not being treated seriously. I hope that’s not this is not the case in this instance.

Personally I found their analysis quite convincing, but then I’m not a nuclear enthusiast, a position reinforced by my belief that there are so many renewable energy alternatives, all of which seem to be easier and less risky to explore, with many of them being marginalised by the continued, and it seems to me, increasingly desperate, focus on nuclear. If China want to try it, fine. But I suspect they will find that it’s a dodgy long shot. As with fusion, I think we should focus our limited UK resources on more immediately productive ideas [instead].

Dave E

George Monbiot, why not start talking to people besides Mark Lynas and his set; people with engineering expertise, to inform your opinion on nuclear power ?

I think the group of artists proposing that Letterkenny, County Donegal, should be twinned with Mars, may have got their Climate Change facts a little twisted :-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/foyle_and_west/8473116.stm

“Irish island twinned with Mars in climate change stunt : An island in County Donegal is to be twinned with Mars in order to raise awareness of climate change. A community near Letterkenny will be linked with an island outcrop on the Red planet. The unusual move was suggested by a group of artists asked by Donegal County Council to explore art’s role in addressing issues of global warming. The Council’s Public Arts Manager, Terri Duffy, said it would act as an “attention-grabbing wake-up call”. “I know it’s a bit ‘out there’ but it is taking a very serious look at the relationship of art and climate change. Some people feel the earth is becoming more Mars like due to the effects of global warming…”

Mars is rather cold, owing to the fact that it doesn’t really have much of an atmosphere and so doesn’t have the benefit of much in terms of the Greenhouse Effect :-

Yes, 95% of the atmosphere that does exist is Carbon Dioxide, but this is not increasing, so there is no Energy imbalance (due to Carbon Dioxide), so there is no, I repeat NO Martian Global Warming (due to Carbon Dioxide) :-

However, Mars is getting a little warmer, it seems :-

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming_2.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece

Talk of Mars brings me out in a rash. It’s known as the “Mars Effect”. Any time Mars is mentioned in the Media, it’s in the service of propaganda. Usually it’s all about supporting massive amounts of money spent on Defence, ahem, Space. With this “twinning” story it appears to be about undermining the Science of Global Warming.

With the possibility of Runaway Global Warming hinted at by Science, it’s not Mars that should be the subject of the twinning with County Donegal : it’s Venus :-

We really don’t want to go there.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100011716/how-the-global-warming-industry-is-based-on-one-massive-lie/

This article, in my view, contains a number of pieces of misleading information, which in my view should be re-framed into their proper context by the author.

He might need to go away and do a little research to find out that his assertions are based on what I think are myths, urban legends and fallacious arguments : he seems firmly convinced that he is right, even though I think he is most definitely up the wrong creek with the wrong paddle, with the wrong map and seriously in danger of capsizing.

My first piece of advice for anyone approaching the thorny subject of Global Warming : read the science.

My second : don’t read the journalists until you’ve read the science : they may well merely distract you with flibbertigibbert nonsense.

And now for a little unpicking of James Delingpole’s latest.

“How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie : By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: September 29th, 2009 : For the growing band of AGW “Sceptics” the following story is dynamite.”

I’ll have to stop you right there, James.

There is no evidence of a “growing band” of [Anthropogenic Global Warming] AGW sceptics, skeptics or deniers.

There is evidence that people are getting bored with hearing about Climate Change, but you can’t count them as signing up as sceptics.

James continues with what looks like a smear :-

“…And for those who do believe in Al Gore’s highly profitable myth about “Man-Made Global Warming”…”

I suspect you’re simply repeating the views of others. If Al Gore’s film and speaking tour about Global Warming were based on a “myth”, then the governments of the world would have found this out by now and stopped attending the United Nations conferences on Climate Change.

“the key scene where big green Al deploys his terrifying graph to show how totally s********ed we all are by man-made global warming. This graph – known as the Hockey Stick Curve – purports to show rising global temperatures through the ages. In the part representing the late twentieth century it shoots up almost vertically.”

James, James, you sound like you’re full of propaganda. There is no “purports” about the entirely factual “Hockey Stick”. The temperature on Earth has really been rocketing recently.

You probably don’t notice rising temperatures because of the vagaries of the weather. Everything in Nature goes up and down, with the rotation of the Earth, the precession of the Earth’s axis, the seasons arising from the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, the wind patterns, the rain patterns, the movements of the Oceans due to the Moon…I could go on…weather is indeed fluctuating, and over the long term, so is climate.

However, the key take-home point you don’t seem to have grasped is that the latter part of the 20th Century is not normal fluctuation. We are looking at something genuinely new. And genuinely genuine.

James appears stuck in his apparent benightedness, “…the graph – devised in 1998 by a US climatologist called Dr Michael Mann – is based on a huge lie, as Sceptics have been saying for quite some time.”

The fact that the “Sceptics” have been saying that the Hockey Stick is a lie for quite some time does not validate their statements.

James pushes the button : “…The first thing they noticed is that this “Hockey Stick” [...] is that it seemed completely to omit the Medieval Warming Period.”

Well James, who’s to say that the fabled “Medieval Warming Period” actually exists ? Was it anything more than a localised European regional blip ?

“According to Mann’s graph, the hottest period in modern history was NOT the generally balmy era between 900 and 1300 but the late 20th century.”

James, at some point you will be forced to admit, not by arm-wrestling or high-pitched arguments, no, by the facts, the data and the evidence all around you, you will be forced to admit that the late 20th Century and early 21st Century have been unusually warm. And unusually rapidly warmed, too.

“This led many sceptics, among them a Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre to smell a rat. He tried to replicate Mann’s tree ring work but was stymied by lack of data: ie the global community of climate-fear-promotion scientists closed ranks and refused to provide him with any information that might contradict their cause.”

Do you not think that since Steve McIntyre is an avowed sceptic (skeptic), and who, I have been told, has been deeply implicated in the spreading of unhelpful conclusions, that the global community of Climate Change scientists might have had pretty reasonable doubts about working with him ?

“…Hadley Centre in Exeter and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia…Their data has formed the basis for the IPCC’s [...] reports; their scientists – among them Professor Phil Jones and tree ring expert Professor Keith Briffa – have been doughty supporters of Mann’s Hockey Stick theory and of the computer models showing inexorably rising temperatures.”

It’s not just computer models that show “inexorably rising temperatures”. The inexorably rising temperatures themselves show the same thing.

Looks like a pretty solid case of looking at the tree rings and seeing no forest. There really is a wood, there, James, you just need to look at the bigger picture.

Don’t knock the computer models. Would you prefer to have a technologically advanced machine to predict the future based on current and historical data, or would you rather ask someone armed only with a finger in the wind ?

“…their misleading predictions of that “barbecue summer” we never had. As [Christopher] Booker says: “Part of the reason why the Met Office has made such a mess of its forecasts for Britain is that they are based on the same models which failed to predict the declining trend in world temperatures since 2001.”"

Tut, tut, James. You have fallen for that old chestnut : weather is not the same as climate. Weather is highly unpredictable. Climate is a long-term set of conditions that are fairly predictable.

And what’s all this ? You use a classic artefact that sceptics have been using for years, you write “the declining trend in world temperatures since 2001″.

Well, if you look at the Hadley trend curves, yes, it looks like the trend is downward since 2001. But the trend of the trend is upward since 1990 – something you omit to admit :-

http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html

If you want to see simple visual confirmation that temperatures are continuing to climb, see here :-

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

In particular, I would like to point you to what I affectionately call the Blob Chart :-

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Ts_vs.year+month.lrg.gif

There is no way that anyone can claim that Global Warming is over.

It might have “taken a short break”. The trend fluctuates all the ime. We’ll see. But no, it’s not finished.

I’m going to pass over the tiresome claims of withholding access to data, which is just unmitigated fluff.

James then goes on to look at tree ring data from just one area of the world, and claims that this undermines the whole of Global Warming science.

“…tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008…The scary red line shooting upwards is the one Al Gore, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa and their climate-fear-promotion chums would like you to believe in. The black one, heading downwards, represents scientific reality.”

It may well represent scientific reality in Yamal in Russia, but it doesn’t necessarily represent scientific reality for the whole world.

It’s true that the Yamal data has been very important in correlation with data from other parts of the world to establish the global impact of volanic eruptions – which have a brief cooling effect – for example :-

Science Direct link

However, the Yamal data, by itself, should not be used as a proxy for global temperature.

Notice how the sceptic charts, that James refers to in his article, miraculously stop at roughly the year 2001.

Now that’s what I call “cherry-picking the data”.

We’ve had a lot of Global Warming since then.

Stop digging around for tree ring data. Come back to the actual, recent temperature records.

Let me refer you again to the up-to-date global picture, NOAA’s State of the Climate :-

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/index.php

“Selected Global Highlights for August 2009 : …The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June-August 2009 was the third warmest on record for the season, 0.59°C above the 20th century average of 15.6°C. For the year to date, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature of 14.5 °C tied with 2003 as the fifth-warmest January-August period on record. This value is 0.55°C above the 20th century average. The worldwide ocean surface temperature for August 2009 was the warmest on record for August, 0.57°C above the 20th century average of 16.4°C. The seasonal (June-August 2009) worldwide ocean surface temperature was also the warmest on record, 0.58°C above the 20th century average of 16.4°C.”

Don’t see no cooling there !

My third piece of advice : trust the scientists, not the journalists, especially those who appear unable to see through the propaganda of disinformation.

James Delingpole is not to be blamed. Perhaps he hasn’t had the strong mentorship and guidance that he needed to see beyond the “Free Speech” manipulation of the data by the American skeptics and their followers, the British sceptics.

The clue is in the name they choose for themselves : “sceptics” hints at nagging doubt, at justified questioning. What they’re actually about is “denial”.

James Delingpole has been misguided, is all.

Dancing with Bicycles

Whenever you hear government ministers or public figures telling the people that technology will save us, remember this : the word “technology” is synonymous with the word “business”.

“Technology” is Big Engineering, and this is what is done by large companies and corporations. Large organisations that make profit by selling manufactured products and Energy always have a surplus set aside for their communications budgets, and that includes persuading government people that their business is invaluable and needs promoting.

Of course the Big Organisations want to save themselves from Climageddon more than they want to save the planet. They have triple bottom lines, Low Carbon commitments and Corporate and Social Responsibility sign-ups. Yet many of them are awash with emissions, as this is the source of their shareholders’ wealth.

So they continue to fund Public Relations and Advertising propaganda to support their business. They want to get inside the heads of the people, and persuade them individually and in small groups to support their products.

They have the funds and the staff and the will to do so, and it would be hard for the ordinary person to detect what’s so incredibly wrongheaded about it, especially since we’re told that grassroots and bottom-up change is all the rage :-

http://www.desmogblog.com/adfero-bonner-astroturfers-prove-guilty-intent-own-advertising

The need to reduce our dependency on Fossil Fuels means that sooner or later we need to address the issue of when we shut down the Fossil Fuel companies. If they haven’t diversified, they’ll be surplus to requirements.

If the public need to be won over to supporting Climate Change legislation, then maybe we have to use the public space that the Fossil Fuel companies exploit, and fund similar levels of propaganda to overrule their genocidal, life-o-cidal business plans.

So far, the public have been asked to back green “technology”, as a kind of springboard for the Fossil Fuel companies to make the jump : to diversify and survive. But Big Technology and the Big Engineering this entails, by and of itself, is not going to solve Climate Change, not even grand geo-engineering schemes :-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6122322/Geo-engineering-should-be-developed-as-insurance-against-dangerous-climate-change.html

Even the Big Energy companies have realised this, I think, and have retreated from their Big Greenwash campaign of the last few years. Let’s name the culprits once again : BP, Shell, ExxonMobil at the top of the stack : their businesses all revolve around selling Fossil Fuels to the people and other businesses.

Since the Property Bubble burst, the only remaining source of wealth generation is in Energy. But with Fossil Fuel Energy still in the ascendant position it is spoiling our chances of solving the emissions problem.

If serious, meaningful and widespread emissions legislation comes into play globally, Big Energy companies will be going to the wall, and the wealth base with them. I think it’s time we started telling people that this could be the reality, and their Pension Fund could collapse, the Stock Markets could collapse, their governments could become overwhelmed with social debt, and their standard of living could be affected, if they don’t switch their investments away from Fossil Fuels.

It’s all very well having a fluffy campaign to ask people to join in and give the Government a mandate for regulatory change :-

http://www.1010uk.org

But will this have the huge impact required, to convince financial bodies to take their money out of Fossil Fuels and invest in Renewable Energies and Energy Conservation ? No, probably not.

In fact, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I could describe the 10:10 campaign as another part of the plan to prevent effective change. Keep all the well-intentioned people busy with cutting their personal emissions by 10% in 2010, and that way they won’t have the energy to fight the Fossil Fuel propaganda.

Only a very small proportion of the population want serious change, because only a very small proportion of the population understand the problems :-

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i95cdYgYkw4qtBvKXa_n70i_pkJgD9ADC1C01

“Canada’s pre-eminent permafrost expert, Chris Burn, has trekked to lonely locations in these high latitudes for almost three decades, meticulously chronicling the changes in the tundra…“If we lost just 1 percent of the carbon in permafrost today, we’d be close to a year’s contributions from industrial sources,” he said. “I don’t think policymakers have woken up to this. It’s not in their risk assessments.”"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/01/global-warming-emissions-fossil-fuels

“…two papers were published by Nature in April. While governments and the United Nations set targets for cuts by a certain date, these papers measured something quite different: the total volume of carbon dioxide we can produce and still stand a good chance of avoiding more than 2C of warming. One paper, from a team led by Myles Allen, shows that preventing more than 2C means producing a maximum of half a trillion tonnes of carbon (1,830bn tonnes of carbon dioxide) between now and 2500 – and probably much less. The other paper, written by a team led by Malte Meinshausen, proposes that producing 1,000bn tonnes of CO2 between 2000 and 2050 would give a 25% chance of exceeding 2C of warming…If you want an idea of what this means, take a look at the global carbon clock at www.know-the-number.com. The level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising at the rate of 2bn tonnes a month (CO2 equivalent). The Allen paper suggests that the world can produce only the equivalent of between 63 and 75 years of current emissions between now and 2500 if we want to avoid more than 2C of warming. Writing elsewhere, the two teams gave us an idea of what this means. At current rates of use, we will burn the ration that Allen set aside for the next 500 years in four decades. Meinshausen’s carbon budget between now and 2050 will have been exhausted before 2030. The World Energy Council (WEC) publishes figures for global reserves of fossil fuels – the minerals that have been identified and quantified, and which it is cost-effective to exploit. The WEC says 848bn tonnes of coal, 177,000bn cubic metres of natural gas and 162bn tonnes of crude oil are good to go. We know roughly how much carbon a tonne of coal, a cubic metre of gas and a barrel of oil contain. The calculations and references are on my website: the result suggests that official reserves of coal, gas and oil amount to 818bn tonnes of carbon. The molecular weight of carbon dioxide is 3.667 times that of carbon. This means that current reserves of fossil fuel, even when we ignore unconventional sources such as tar sands and oil shale, would produce 3,000bn tonnes of carbon dioxide if they were burnt. So, in order not to exceed 2C of global warming, we can burn, according to Allen’s paper, a maximum of 60% of current fossil fuel reserves by 2500. Meinshausen says we’ve already used one-third of his 2050 budget since 2000, which suggests that we can afford to burn only 22% of current reserves between now and 2050. If you counted unconventional sources (the carbon content is much harder to calculate), the proportion would be even smaller…”

How do we make this vanishingly small number of aware people have the greatest effect ? Well, clearly we do need public campaigns that are accessible – asking people to curb their Carbon is not a wrong thing to do. Yet asking individuals to change is an inadequate strategy : conversion to a cause always has a low success rate.

My proposal is to ask all of you, who really understand the mess we’re in, to make a commitment to use every form of communication from now on, for the rest of your lives, to say what needs to be said : Fossil Fuels must go; deforestation must stop; agriculture must de-chemicalise; Energy Waste must halt; Renewable Energies must come; Energy Efficiency in all manufactured goods must be law; Public Transport must be universal…

If you have any spare time, funds, means, put out these messages in your own words in every channel you can find. Be fluffy or spiky, friendly or firm. Tell, don’t recruit. Inform, don’t beg. Raise the level of alarm. Uncover the false solutions proposed. Question everything. Unsettle everyone. But still be nice to people : inclusive (if you can be); instructive but not commanding; informal…Play nicely, but play all the time.

It’s time for the communications experts of the world to rise up and chat.