Image Credit : Baby Creative
Over the last couple of years, almost everything I have been involved with, the E.On Energy supply company has sought to get its big coal-dust grubby hands on. It seems. The latest twist in this saga involves the Claverton Energy Research Group.
Now even friends break ranks with Levitt and Dubner over their new tome Superfreakonomics – a clear throw-back to the 1980s.
Is it time to ask for a reprint with all the errors corrected ?
https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aVKXZg_Z.vMY
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) — Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner are so good at tweaking conventional wisdom that their first book, “Freakonomics,” sold 4 million copies. So when Dubner, an old friend, told me their new book would take on climate change, I was rooting for a breakthrough idea.
No such luck. In “SuperFreakonomics,” their brave new climate thinking turns out to be the same pile of misinformation the skeptic crowd has been peddling for years.
“Obviously, provocation is not last on the list of things we’re trying to do,” Dubner told me the other day. This time, the urge to provoke has driven him and Levitt off the rails and into a contrarian ditch.
…Having downplayed the problem, they try to solve it with a set of silver-bullet technologies known as geoengineering. One would shoot millions of tons of sulfur dioxide 18 miles into the air to artificially cool the planet. This could work; it also could have dire unintended consequences.
Caldeira, who is researching the idea, argues that it can succeed only if we first reduce emissions. Otherwise, he says, geoengineering can’t begin to cope with the collateral damage, such as acidic oceans killing off shellfish.
Levitt and Dubner ignore his view and champion his work as a permanent substitute for emissions cuts. When I told Dubner that Caldeira doesn’t believe geoengineering can work without cutting emissions, he was baffled. “I don’t understand how that could be,” he said. In other words, the Freakonomics guys just flunked climate science.”
https://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/10/superfreakonimics-climate-change-controversy.php
https://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/SuperFreakonomics-on-Global-Warming-220
“It all started with climate activist Joe Romm accusing the authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner of global warming denial and misrepresenting the research of a key climate scientist. They pushed back, and fellow New York Times blogger and celebrated columnist Paul Krugman jumped in the fray…”
Compare and contrast the perfectly reasonably statements from Gordon Brown against the fearmongering of Christopher Monckton :-
https://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977860385&grpId=3659174697241980
https://www.rightpundits.com/?p=4893
If Climate Change takes a “One World Government” to solve it, I say “bring it on” ! (And can we have Gordon Brown as the President ?)
The Competitive Enterprise Institute in the United States of America wants to save the bottled water market.
It also wants to try to convince people that Climate Change policy is bad news, against Freedom, and based on fear.
There will be a new film, charmingly entitled “Climate Chains” with a whole new palette of Climate Change denial and policy refusal arguments, so it would be well worth watching it when it comes out, to help us work out how to nip these myths in the bud.
https://www.globalwarming.org/2009/09/17/climate-chains-trailer/
https://www.climatechains.com/about.html
https://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-19-chamber-plays-the-fool-in-yes-men-hoax
https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a3IaPOkIataY
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/19/chamber-of-commerce-hoax_n_326069.html
https://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN1939867120091019
This will probably get taken down eventually :-
https://www.oneclimate.net/2009/10/19/us-chamber-of-commerce-announces-free-enterprise-climate-policy/
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20091019/tpl-environment-us-chamber-climate-legis-02bfc7e.html
Image Credit : Bankside Press
The big problem with re-tooling for the new Low Carbon world is not so much about changing Energy consumption behaviour, although that plays a part.
It’s not even really Energy supply behaviour, although that is probably more significant.
No, the key to the door to the greener future is investment behaviour.
“The headlines have been harrowing to say the least. “Some experts believe that mankind is on the threshold of a new pattern of adverse global climate for which it is ill-prepared.” one New York Times article declared. It quoted climate researchers who argued that “this climate change poses a threat to the people of the world.” A Newsweek article, citing a National Academy of Sciences report, warned that climate change “would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale.” Worse yet, “climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change or even to allay its effects.” Who in his or her right mind wouldn’t be scared of global warming ? But that’s not what these scientists were talking about. These articles, published in the mid-1970s, were predicting the effects of global cooling…”
And so, in just a few short paragraphs from Chapter 5, in the new Superfreakonomics book from the Freakonomicsts Levitt and Dubner, the authors show they’ve been taken in by a Climate Change sceptic Trojan horse.
Following in the wake of the rabidly successful crowd-funded “Age of Stupid” film, the Climate Change deniers hit back with a little film of their own.
By some fluke of irony, just like the film that was entitled “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, which was a swindle, this film calls itself “Not Evil, Just Wrong” :-
https://www.noteviljustwrong.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Evil_Just_Wrong
“They want to CLOSE OUR FACTORIES” ? I’ve got news for you, sunshine. You don’t own the factories. The factories are owned by the big, rich people.
Tears Before Bedtime
The UK Government’s latest infommercial on Climate Change is appallingly bad. It has been aired on television for millions of unsuspecting soap opera addicts.
Last year I complained to Roger Harrabin of the BBC by electronic mail regarding what I considered to be an unhelpful headline to an online article concerned with Global Warming. I also criticised the way that part of the article was written, as it had the potential to be misinterpreted.
Some of the people who read this web log who are in personal communication with me will know what happened next, but I’m not going to go over it again at this juncture, suffice it to say that a person or persons unknown reported the electronic mail exchange to a group of people who self-style as “Climate Change sceptics”, after which I found myself curiously infamous, and found it best to lie low for a while.
Even after this furore, why do we continue to see horrible headlines ?
The computer equipment you are at this moment using relies on an effect known as “quantum tunneling”, delivering an energy payload across a seemingly inpenetrable medium.
It is, if you like, a subversion of the apparent macro-scale laws of the universe. Nothing is quite what you think it is.
Sometimes you can learn a snippet of useful information from television. It’s rare, and fleeting, but can have impact.
The other night on terror-vision, I watched the sumptuous Fahrenheit 451, a film made in 1966 by Francois Truffaut, based on the science fiction book by Ray Bradbury. I forget which channel it was on. Who cares ? All television is the same in the end.
***************** College, University of ****************
MSc ******************************* programme
Year : 1 : Course Module : Climate Change
Reading Task : 6th October 2009
Read : Michaels, P.J. (2009) : “Global Warming and Climate Change”.
In : Cato Handbook for Policymakers (ed. D. Boaz, 7th edition). Cato Institute, p. 475-485.
Available from :-
https://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb111/hb111-45.pdf
1) How does he explain the observed periods of warming in the IPCC record?
Michaels states : “human activity has been a contributor since 1975.”
Image Credit : White River Valley Museum, Auburn
The people have spoken, but the people still have more to say. This Tuesday, 13th October 2009 at roughly 6.30pm, the people of Highams Park will once again climb the steps of Walthamstow Town Hall demanding the Council Planning Committee agree a smaller footprint from the proposed Tesco development.
15th October 2009 will be Blog Action Day on Climate Change :-
In the continuing saga of the mainstream Media massaging of the facts, and framing our concerns for us, you may have noticed news about a deadly earthquake in Sumatra and a horror tsunami in Samoa, but you probably won’t have noticed the very active Typhoon season in the Western Pacific.
After our Masters class on the last 600 million years of Earth Climate history, a number of the students all collected together in the student bar.
One of our number pulled out a block of A4 paper on which he had written a number of probing questions.
At the very top of the list : asking how one could justify the “social cost” of Carbon.
I pulled my “remember Montreal” cat out of the bag.
The Claverton Energy Group will be holding its 8th Conference from 23rd to 25th October 2009 at the headquarters of Wessex Water, Claverton Down in Bath, England.
Advances in Energy technologies old and new will be presented amongst a wide-ranging and influential forum of engineers. The focus, as ever, will be the development of new infrastructure, within the context of the urgent need to de-Carbonise Energy supply.
So I’m in the hospital emergency room with a very aged relative with a dodgy ticker, and I’m doing what I can to offer some shred of comfort, stroking head, clasping hand, chatting about this and that.
And I’m looking at the digital monitor, displaying readings from various intensive care technology. And I watch as the arrhythmia, the irregular beating of the heart, clearly shows itself if you stop to look at the display for long enough.
Professor Mimura’s interview 1 of 3 from UNUChannel on Vimeo.
Climate Change costs in Japan are going to be “sensational”, and worse if storms become more violent.
That could well happen :-
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090925-supertyphoons-japan-global-warming.html
“Supertyphoons to Strike Japan Due to Global Warming : Julian Ryall in Tokyo, Japan : for National Geographic News : September 25, 2009 : Increasingly powerful “supertyphoons” will strike Japan if global warming continues to affect weather patterns in the western Pacific Ocean, scientists say. Supercomputer simulations show there will be more typhoons with winds of 179 miles (288 kilometers) per hour—considered an F3 on the five-level Fujita Scale—by 2074…”
A report into the waterless conditions in the South Eastern United States of America concludes that Climate Change is not the predominant factor.
Phew ! We can all breathe a sigh of relief !
After a week of parry and counter-riposte, it is time to shout “en garde” to the editors at the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
In a peaceful way. Without swords.
After my careers in engineering and information technology, I went back to university today, to train for my third career, in sustainable development.
Like most of the other people enrolling on the course, I want a green job, and I’m prepared to study for it.
The only future for the economy is in clean energy and saved energy, Renewables and Conservation, and I want to be in there, doing something productive and practical.
In answer to one of my many raging, almost apoplectic, detractors, I have written this.
Since I believe that sceptics can be people, too, I’m going to respond to you, even though I think you’re being unfactual, and I feel you’re being unreasonable.
Some of the science that needs to be presented is the psychology of denial.
People who deny the science of Global Warming do so because they don’t want their life, wealth and freedom to be interfered with.
They feel they deserve liberty. But anybody who lives in any kind of community, especially in an urban environment, is not free at all, and never can be.
https://www.unep.org/compendium2009/
Not a fairytale, and not a comforting bedtime story either.