Harmless Sky

[Peter has very kindly sent me his impressions of the lecture. Many thanks, TonyN]

I went to the Plimer Lecture organised by The Spectator and thought I would share some of my first impressions.I arrived early with my son Leo and we were ushered into the reception area for drinks; not free I may add. Whilst standing there I spotted Lord Monckton, and as he was not at that moment chatting to anyone we boldly walked up and introduced ourselves. We were joined by Roger Helmer MEP and a number of others. My overriding impression from this chat is that politicians are so far out of touch with their electorate that I fear for Democracy itself. More to come from this chat.

On to the lecture, which  was very well presented in the form of a plotted history of the earth from 5.4 billions years last Thursday until today.  It was delivered with humour, and it was obvious that Ian Plimer knew his stuff.  For me I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know, but I didn’t expect to, having read his book.

We then had questions from the audience.  In the main these were in the form of a thank you and questions on how or what can be done to ge the message across to politicians and the “masses” for want of a better word. There were a few requests for qualification and I thought that Ian was less at ease when answering questions not directly related to his work.  There was nothing revealing coming out from these early questions. Read the rest of this entry »

At a time when we are all meant to be good disciples of the new climate change orthodoxy you would think that a lecture by a leading sceptic filling a large lecture hall in London might be newsworthy. Well it certainly isn’t at the BBC.

I was doing he usual start-of-day things this morning, while listening with half an ear to the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme, when I heard something astonishing. Justin Webb, one of the presenters, introduced an interview with an eminent scientist who is also a leading climate change sceptic. Here’s what he said: Read the rest of this entry »

In the first part of his new book, Peter Taylor scrutinises the scientific research that underpins concern about global warming and finds that it is unconvincing. This extract, taken from the second part of the book, looks at the political dynamics that have promoted global warming to the top of the international agenda. As a life-long environmental campaigner Peter is well placed to consider the role that activist organisations have played in this process.

Many thanks to Peter for allowing Harmless Sky to use this material. Click on the image to find out more about Chill.

_____________________________________________________

In addition to the world of science institutions, governmental influence and media bias, there has also been a growing and powerful environmental lobby pressing for an unequivocal commitment from the scientists. NGOs well appreciated that governments will not move when there is major uncertainty and a lobby has evolved out of a coalition of interests on the part of environmental campaigners and those industries standing to gain from a shift in policy. Naturally, there is also an opposing lobby from oil, gas and coal interests. The nuclear lobby has remained somewhat hidden, but has benefited enormously from the climate issue. Some campaign groups have allied directly to renewable energy interests, especially wind turbine manufacturers and solar collectors, whereas others have remained independent of commercial interests but used the projections of technology and capability to underpin their campaigns.

In addition to these straightforward political alliances, there has been a growing corporatisation of the environmental sector. NGOS have grown from a few small back-street offices into a multi-million dollar international organisation - in the case of Greenpeace, with a fleet of ships, modern office suites, staff and pension funds. Such organisation requires a steady income stream and does not have the option, as for example at the end of a successful ocean pollution campaign to simply pack up and go home. When an organisation’s ethos is essentially combative, it seeks out problems and threats.

Which is fine, as long as there really are serious threats that cannot be dealt with by trusted government.  But in my view, as a seasoned campaigner, the game changed significantly after Rio in 1992. The ‘enemy’ metamorphosed from being the dumpers and polluters ably supported by a science- industry alliance (including the modellers), to a more subtle menace. As a result of the shift to the Precautionary Principle, industry and the regulators began to move in another direction - Clean Development Mechanisms were set in motion and large amounts of money shifted toward preventative strategies. This shift required a different type of environmental organisation, and although the campaign groups made significant efforts to provide ‘solutions’, they were still ruled by the old ethos of campaign and combat. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week it became clear that the Advertising Standards Authority had launched an inquiry into the Government’s £6m TV advertising campaign aimed at climate change sceptics. Now it appears that the UK broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, will also investigate complaints that the advert is politically motivated and therefore breeches the ban on broadcasting political adverts. They would seem to have good reason for deciding to do so.

This is what the advert tells viewers about climate change:

(If the video viewer does not appear on your computer then use this link)

-

-

So far, the ASA has received over 650 complaints and rising. That score ranks with the most complained about advert of 2008, which attracted 840 complaints. According to a letter that I received from the ASA this morning the following points will be investigated: Read the rest of this entry »

[Back in December 2007, Dr David Whitehouse, who was for many years a science correspondent and then science editor at the BBC, wrote a very controversial article for the New Statesman entitled ‘Has Global Warming Stopped?’. This sparked a heated blog debate that accumulated some 3000 comments before the New Statesman closed it and the discussion then transferred to Harmless Sky. A further 7000 comments have been posted since then. 

This is an update to that article and was written in response to a report by the BBC’s David Shukman which can be found here. It’s worth looking at this before reading on, and also noting that David Whithouse’s article pre-dates Paul Hudson’s What happened to global warming? story on the BBC website]

=

It took quite a while for the fact that global annual average temperatures haven’t altered for a decade to become accepted by mainstream science, even if there are many who still doubt that it is either happening or important. Likewise one must also be glad that the media is catching up. Especially glad because it is the BBC.

One should take encouragement from the broadcast version of the Met ffice’s “Four degrees of warming ‘likely’” in that when referring to the recent temperature standstill it says that scientists have questioned it. The report did not call these questioners sceptics. Lets hope this nomenclature is applied consistently in the future by the organisation that said in 2005 that the science was settled.

However, the report did let a scientist get away with a biased interpretation of why the standstill has occurred, or rather bypassing the problematic nature of its existence. Dr Myles Allen said that one should look at the figures that are relevant, that is decade to decade changes. He said that temperatures are rising exactly as predicted as long as 30 years ago.

Well, I will leave the comment about as long as 30 years ago for your perusal in the context of climatic variations.

Dr Allen is wrong. The latest spell of warming began about 1980 following 40 years of standstill (still not adequately explained) and 90 prior years of warming. His decade to decade change is a less than two decade spell of warming, to the mid 1990’s, during which the warming increased at a rate much faster than the IPCC estimated the CO2 effect could account for. Since then there has been no change although of course it is warmer than it was in the 70s. This is another example of scientific double standards. The recent standstill is, of course, natural variability, the recent rise is, of course, man-made. It couldn’t possibly be the other way around? (Computer models can explain the recent trends, or more accurately, it is possible to select a few models that do from amongst the many that do not.)

Let’s look at decade-to-decade variability. In the past 15 decades it has warmed in 10 of them and stayed static in 5. But 8 of those decades were pre-1940 when we are told that man-made climate change had not taken effect. Since it has taken effect - a review of papers suggests a consensus of 1950 as a starting point - there have been 4 decades of standstill and 2 of warming. The recent warm decade is also no further above the mean global temperature than the cold Victorian age was below it.

It is alarming that the argument is moving away from real-world data and its inconvenience. The computer models point decades ahead and cannot be refuted. The UK Met Office says that global warming will resume 2009-2014, other scientists disagree. But even if the Met Office is proven wrong in its 2009-2014 forecast then it can still look to future decades and say it’s easier to predict 50 years ahead than 5!

The IPPC’s next assessment is due in 2014, but since the last one did not take into account the overwhelming major aspect of climate change of our time - the recent standstill - a more urgent review is needed.

[Dr Whitehouse’s comments were originally addressed to Benny Peiser of CCNet and I am posting them here with David’s kind permission.  Another article by David Whitehouse, dealing with the controversy at the New Statesman, and particularly with the reaction of its environment columnist Mark Lynas, will be posted here shortly.]

When I am watching the day-to-day unfolding of the AGW controversy it often seems that things are moving slowly and not much is happening. All that changes if I come back after three weeks away and try to catch up.

Here are a few things that have caught my eye.

At Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre’s remarkable blog, a whole new scandal over the failure of climate scientists to make data available for review has blown up. In this case it concerns the Yamal tree-ring series that has played an important role in reconstructions of past climate as it imparts a fashionable hockey stick configuration to scary graphs.

You can unravel just what has happened at Climate Audit if you are at home with heavy-duty statistical analysis, or for an excellent summary for the layman see Bishop Hill’s post here.

This is an important story, as much for what it says about professional standards in climate research as for the doubts that it casts on the integrity of the data. Palaeoclimatology is never likely to be quite the same again; without those hockey sticks it has nothing to contribute to AGW alarmism.

The Tyndall Centre has a bright idea for winning the war on climate change: Read the rest of this entry »

In December of last year I posted about the efforts at the Poznan Conference (here)  to prepare the way for a successor to the Kyoto Treaty. This was scheduled to be agreed at Copenhagen this December. I suggested that at a time of economic crisis, politicians and activists would find it very difficult to carry public opinion with them on this issue. But in an address to the 11,000 delegates at Poznan, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said:

The economic crisis is serious, yet when it comes to climate change, the stakes are even far [sic] higher. The climate crisis affects our potential prosperity and our people’s lives both now and in the future.

Un Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the Poznan Conference, Dec 2008

At that time, the developing nations main objection to signing up at Copenhagen was that they wanted to see the US committed to reducing greenhouse gases, through legally binding regulation, before they would do the same. The inauguration of President Obama in the following month unleashed a wave of optimism in the climate alarmism camp, but this was short lived. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I was talking to a friend who had a serious problem with a large quango that is supposed to look after the countryside. He is unfortunate enough to have a remarkably robust species of lichen on his land that ecologists are interested in, and a Site of Special Scientific Interest has been created to ensure its protection, although there is absolutely no indication that the lichen is in any danger, or is ever likely to be.He needed to do some work in the area concerned and, although there was no question of the lichens being harmed, it was necessary to get permission from the quango. Letters and phone calls got him nowhere, so a site visit was arranged. He had assumed that, as is usually the case, once he met someone face-to-face common sense would prevail and an agreement which accommodated everyones interests would be quickly reached. He is rather proud of his lichens and is keen that they should continue to flourish.

At this stage I should say that the quango is very, very environmental and so is my friend. He moves in environmental circles, does environmental things, and is happily convinced that humans are destroying the planet, which gives him even more environmental things to do. On the other hand, there is a part of him that still takes a very levelheaded view of bureaucracy, activism and extremism.

When I spoke to him he said that the person from the quango and he had spent several hours walking the land, examining, considering and discussing everything. “And did you managed to sort it all out?” I asked. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Taylor’s CHILL: a Reassessment of Global Warming Theory is really two books in one. The first part covers the science of climate change in exhaustive detail and provides an alternative to the orthodox view. Taylor, who has impeccable green credentials, describes “the technocratic and communalist approach” in a masterly analysis of how we arrived at this point through “a combination of zealotry which somehow has managed to portray the science as unequivocal when it’s not”. The second part covers policy, politics and remedies.

A main theme of the first part of the book is that we take too linear a view of
climate-trend projections, without recognising past patterns and cycles
which could include future cooling. I am comfortable with that notion, as any observer of history is provided with clear evidence that climate oscillates in numerous
cycles of warm and cold periods.

Readers who believe Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and who consider the IPCC
climate assessments are factual, unbiased and objective, will not like this
book. As Taylor says: “It is clear to me that IPCC has made such a forthright commitment to the standard (Co₂ ) policy model, that it has a biased attitude to new data that does not conform to that model.” And:

“It is striking that a small group of men working behind computer screens created a virtual reality in which the future climate became the enemy of mankind. That original cabal was likely innocent of any underhand motivation and genuinely believed mankind faced a threat and that they would sound the alert and potentially stave off disaster. But sociologists will go a little bit further and look at the social environment that pawned the very concepts of the climate game, many of which we take entirely for granted. For example the notion that humanity itself can be under threat or that the planet might need to be saved. These are very recent notions, at least from a societal perspective, and do not bear closer scientific scrutiny. “

This book is a breath of fresh air in pointing out the numerous contradictions in the orthodox climate science camps that believe themselves uniquely exempt to the notion that they should actually prove their scientific hypotheses Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when a leading environmental campaigner meets a Spectator columnist, who is sceptical about climate change, on a BBC discussion programme, and there is a question about carbon emissions and wind farms?This was the situation on last Friday’s Any Questions, which was chaired by Jonathan Dimbleby who, while scrupulously trying to maintain an appearance of impartiality on such subjects, never quite manages to conceal his sympathy for the warmist cause.

Any Questions is broadcast from a different venue each week, with a local audience, although it is not unusual for panellists with a cause to make sure that there are a few of their supporters in the audience. The venue for this edition was the quaintly named Middle Wallop, a rural community set in the rolling Hampshire countryside.

At the beginning of the programme, he introduced the main protagonists in the following way:

Jonathan Porritt: Doyen of the green party, founder of Forum for the Future, and until a few weeks ago, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, and the government’s chief environmental adviser, to which post he was appointed by Tony Blair a decade ago.

James Delingpole: comes from a rather different tradition, author and Spectator columnist, he reviles what he calls the deceit and lies of the anthropogenic global warming industry … He’s also scathing about left liberals who he is prone to see in his words as ‘stupid’.

There were two other members of the panel, Kate Mosse, a novelist who has sold some 5 million books, and Mark Stephens a lawyer specialising in the entertainment industry.

The question about climate change came from a Mr Gent, who asked, ‘Is the answer to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions blowing in the wind?’

On this programme the panel genuinely do not know what the questions will be, although they may be able to guess what is likely to be come up and do some home work. The chairman immediately slipped the poisoned pill to Delingpole, although he must have realised that pitting a journalist with no specialised knowledge of this subject against a specialist like Porritt could make for an uneven contest. And addressing the question first is always a disadvantage; there is nothing to react to and no thinking time. Read the rest of this entry »