It’s a shame that the Financial Times saw fit to publish an article with the headline “US senator calls global warming a ‘hoax’”, considering the intense debate going on regarding the science of Climate Change.
On the other hand, it does show up the untidy mind of James Inhofe quite spectacularly, so maybe it is useful :-
https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b68c23ea-e0fc-11de-af7a-00144feab49a.html
Professor Mike Hulme has been the science chap the BBC nearly always call, of late, when they want to inject an alternate view into a piece on Climate Change.
https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6115644.stm
“Chaotic world of climate truth” Viewpoint by Mike Hulme, 4 November 2006
The author of the book “Why We Disagree About Climate Change” has been bravely trying to reframe Climate Change, not as a problem of science, but a problem of society. To some extent, I regard his work as useful. On the other hand, I find some of his work a mind trap.
We’ve had Oxbridge Classics and Language graduates denying Global Warming in the Press in the last couple of weeks; now we’re on to the political commentators.
Why Global Warming Science is a matter for adversarial politics, you know Left and Right, liberal and conservative, I don’t know.
Global Climate Change is affecting us all, and pretty much the same steps will need to be taken by whichever party is in power, in whichever country. It doesn’t really have a political flavour. It’s not a matter of choice, or choice of policy. Climate Change policy is not based on political ideology.
The Daily Telegraph seems most keen that the business sector should be at the Copenhagen Climate Change negotiations :-
“Copenhagen Climate Change summit: do businesses need to be there? : The Copenhagen Climate Change summit is fast approaching. There’s going to be an army of negotiators in the Danish capital but do businesses need to be there? By Kamal Amed : Published: 19 Nov 2009 : …while there’s been an awful lot on the politics of Copenhagen…there has been relatively little on what the business sector is supposed to be saying or doing. Many big players are privately indicating that they need to be there for political reasons rather than business reasons and that the whole thing is, ahem, a load of hot air. Looking more broadly, […] there is a danger that the whole event becomes little more than a photo-opportunity…that might give us all time to consider exactly the business and finance sector is supposed to be doing to tackle climate change…”
[ UPDATE : More science on solar irradiation change and how it cannot explain the high levels of recent Global Warming : https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/a-problem-of-multiplicity/ ]
Some people have been asking why I’ve been so picky about Richard Black, the BBC environmental journalist.
I found fault with a blog post of his that had a lot of good, illuminating stuff in it, yet still managed to misdirect people, in my opinion.
What we read in the papers, online and watch on the television has a longlasting effect on us. If the news is skewed, and if it continues to be skewed, we are being manipulated.
A huge round of applause for Kevin Rudd, Australia’s Prime Minister, for lambasting, basting and roasting the Climate Change deniers :-
To be honest, he was taller than I expected, and more Eastern in appeareance, a kind of lanky version of Mehmet behind the deli counter at my local Turkish International Food Emporium.
David Miliband was also considerably thinner than I would have liked, considering he might one day rule the New Labour Party, who might just rule my country again. We wouldn’t want him blown away by the slightest breeze, surely, would we ? He needs feeding in my opinion.
“Established science is excluded from account”
It appears to me from the following blog post :-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/10/climates_magnetic_attraction.html
that Richard Black is either (a) entirely ignorant of the relevant science or is (b) deliberately not including the relevant science.
He does not include the well-known counterpoints to Piers Corbyn’s theories on Global Warming.
He poses a challenge to Climate Change scientists that has already been answered in the literature.
To: Richard Black, BBC
Dear Richard,
It is with relief (but not triumph) that I can announce to you the end of Climate Change “scepticism”.
The new Canadian publication “Climate Cover-Up”, by James Hoggan, points the finger fairly and squarely at vested corporate interests in the continuing saga of Global Warming denial and delaying tactics, both in North America and in the United Kingdom.
He has collated evidence showing that the contrarians have an agenda to confuse and disinform the public, and that the Media have just gone along with this. Probably because editors don’t know any better. Possibly because journalists are too lazy or busy to learn the science.
The Science of Climate Change couldn’t be clearer, the agreement between specialists and experts in the field couldn’t be closer; Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” couldn’t be more accurate, and has been vindicated by numerous proxies.
Here’s a round-up of some of the published opinion regarding the new Superfreakonomics book (since the last time I weblogged about it) [ UPDATE : adding a few more links at the end. ] :-
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt
“An open letter to Steve Levitt : raypierre @ 29 October 2009 : Dear Mr. Levitt, The problem of global warming is so big that solving it will require creative thinking from many disciplines. Economists have much to contribute to this effort, particularly with regard to the question of how various means of putting a price on carbon emissions may alter human behavior. Some of the lines of thinking in your first book, Freakonomics, could well have had a bearing on this issue, if brought to bear on the carbon emissions problem. I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.”
In the continuing saga of the travels of Ed Miliband’s favourite suit and tie, here they are again, this time in South Africa, with not a crumple or hint of poor, local dust on them. Marvellous !
The Grist magazine is recommending people take actions of civil disobedience on 24th October 2009, in support of “350 Day” :-
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…”
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
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The British Climate Change Minister Ed Miliband has admitted at the Labour Party Conference that there are low commitment levels to dealing with the causes of Global Warming :-
When I was asked to review a chunk of the 2008 Climate Safety report from the Public Interest Research Centre, I was less than positive about the social movement building outlined in the recommendations for “mobilisation” of the public (see below).
Tim Holmes, one of the people involved in the Climate Safety report, has started a new web log critiquing the very same issues :-
https://convenientlies.wordpress.com
https://convenientlies.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/greenwashing-government/
Dr Richard Betts of the British Meteorological Office speaking at the 4 Degrees (and beyond) conference in Oxford this week :-
https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php
“It’s important to stress it’s not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.”
Some of the potential problems from a four degree average rise in global temperature are being outlined to the conference.
There are spectacular regional warming issues, most notably for the Arctic region.
There’s the real world. And then there’s “Daily Telegraph world”, a fantasy mindscape, it seems to me.
In yet another piece that seems to be written for the sole purpose of attacking wind power, massaged in under the banner of standing up for the fuel poor :-
is this outstanding piece of reporting about Atomic Energy in the United Kingdom :-
“Nuclear, by contrast, is unsubsidised.”