Visualizing the East Anglia Climate Research Unit Leaked Email Network from Michael J Bommarito II on Vimeo.
I found this vimeo video on a webpage describing a Climate Change sceptic’s attempts to get data from NASA using Freedom of Information requests :-
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.
Some days are sunny, funny, bright days, with laughter, humour and merry whistling and chortling. But always I come back to humming and mumbling this little tune : “we’re in the doo-doos”, sung of course, to the Gold Diggers film song of 1933, substituting the word “money”.
We are in deep, steaming, reeking piles of muck with Climate Change. There’s no two ways about it. It’s pure, unadulterated, fetid crappola :-
https://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org
Well, at least the Sixth and possibly final Great Extinction of Life on Earth will make some great compost, just in case anything survives that needs feeding.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/copenhagen/
https://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/copenhagen_diagnosis.php
https://www.desmogblog.com/state-climate-much-worse-predicted
If you care to actually spend 10 seconds looking at the NASA GISS “Blob Chart” (see link above), you will easily detect a continually warming trend. Yes, there are dips and climbs. Yes, there is variability. No, Global Warming did not stop in 1998.
This very easy-reading level of visual information, apparently, is not good enough to convince Janet Daley that Global Warming is happening. She just can’t make it out amongst all the noise, probably coming from the Climate Change Deniers.
Whether she knows it or not, she is not telling the truth.
“Where there’s muck, there’s brass”, as some people in England say. Waste and pollution can be big moneymakers for some, as local and national government bodies strive to ensure a safe, clean environment for their citizens.
Dealing with Carbon pollution is, however, in a different league of Big Dirt than the municipal waste stream, litter picks and recycling efforts. It’s even in a much larger landscape than Energy supply infrastructure and global fuel distribution systems.
Carbon emissions are in everything we do, practically, from texting to flying; from cooking to holidaying; from home comfort to laundry.
We can have school poster competitions that influence dog walkers to clean up after their pooches and hounds, but it’s not going to be so easy to cut the Carbon from our entire civilisation.
My God made the World. From my point of view. From your point of view, your God (if you have a God), made the World. If you don’t believe in any Higher Power, then you make the World, as you learn about it and gain understanding.
Roger Helmer MEP, bless his holey cotton socks, has accused the Church of England of having “abandoned” the Faith, by espousing concern about Global Warming :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-denier-roger-helmer-church
Yet another tree-ring-centric posting from Anthony (pronounced anth-o-knee) Watts, showing his complete obsession with something minuscule and mindblowingly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Watts will not allow fact to cloud accusation. All the charts on Global Warming show a sharp rise in the last few decades, from whichever reliable source. But Watts doesn’t see any of that. He’s fixated on Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick graph and trying to pull it down.
Tree rings. Now, trees, especially dead trees, are notoriously random in quality and style and abundance. You have to make reasonable decisions about which to keep in the data set as representative, and which to jettison. It doesn’t invalidate your results. In fact, it shows that you have done sufficient analysis to select the most accurate data.
So this big plan for international Carbon Trading, how long will it take to set up all the national and regional markets ? And how long will it take to get some kind of serious reduction in Carbon Emissions using the market ?
Well, judging by this week’s slalom race on the melting Climate piste, I’d say it will be a good few years yet before a functioning international Carbon market will be viable, and a good few years after that that it will start to deliver any real reductions in emissions.
That could easily take us past 2015, the year that Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre knows we have to peak our emissions or face Climageddon (unless we can produce negative emissions. Yeah. Right.) :-
https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php
Presentation Slides : https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/ppt/10-1anderson.pdf
Presentation Audio : https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/audio/10-1anderson.mp3
Someday, all journalists who report on Climate Change and Energy will not only have relevant Science and Technology training, but they will also be allowed the time to fact-check corporate-sponsored-academic-research Press Releases before being asked to publish articles written around those Press Releases.
I absolutely adore Alok Jha writing for the The Guardian newspaper. He’s young, smart, good-looking, intelligent, and studied Physics at Imperial College, London. He writes well. His heart is clearly in the right place. Some of the things the The Guardian publish with his name under them could, however, be a little more incisive.
Possibly some good news from the world of Carbon Sink science : the Earth may be soaking up progressively more Carbon Dioxide as time goes by instead of refusing to do so :-
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.
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Since the book “Climate Cover-Up : The Crusade to Deny Global Warming” by James Hoggan does not appear to be available in the United Kingdom as of now, I have taken the liberty of transcribing a brief passage about Carbon Capture and Storage.
The thrust of the passage, and in fact two whole chapters of the book, which everybody should read, is that
(a) even with Carbon Capture, Coal will never be “Clean” and
(b) that there has been a deliberate propaganda campaign amongst the public and in the corridors of power to promote Carbon Capture even though it cannot clean up Coal.
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.”
So, I’m sitting in a bar, chatting with some acquaintances.
We start talking about the adjustments that will have to take place in Europe as Climate Change starts to bite : mass migration, changes in the food growing systems, water management, waste management, that sort of thing.
Then I mentioned Australia. I said I had watched part of the Scorched TV presentation, which portrays the urban areas of Australia as suffering from severe water shortages and raging bushfire in the very near future.
In the group of people there, we knew of current cases of water supply problems and enforceable water restrictions already in place.
I must say, the Daily Telegraph gets top marks for loyalty.
On the occasion of the publication of a book based on Global Warming myths and mendacities, by Christopher Booker, the author himself gets a huge chunk of online column to promote himself, his views and his opus, without the shred of a question about a possible conflict of interest :-
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6425269/The-real-climate-change-catastrophe.html
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 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.
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.”
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.
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.
https://www.unep.org/compendium2009/
Not a fairytale, and not a comforting bedtime story either.
The floodgates of change may well open in the United States of America. It appears that power companies can be brought to court for the public nuisance of Global Warming…
https://www.thepoptort.com/2009/09/yowsa-major-environmental-ruling-in-greenhouse-gas-case.html
“September 30, 2009 : Yowsa! Major Environmental Ruling in Greenhouse Gas Case!”
“Corporate polluters have been getting hauled into court for many years for lotsa reasons, one being that their dirty activities are a “public nuisance”…”
“Well now, thanks to a landmark New York federal court ruling, this “public nuisance” theory has been applied in a major global warming case brought by eight states, New York City and environmental groups.”
“In a nutshell, the court panel (which consisted of two Republican appointees) found that the nation’s largest coal-burning utilities could be held accountable for global warming.”
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 :-