This is a continuation of a remarkable thread that has now received 10,000 comments running to well over a million words. Unfortunately its size has become a problem and this is the reason for the move.
The history of the New Statesman thread goes back to December 2007 when Dr David Whitehouse wrote a very influential article for that publication posing the question Has Global Warming Stopped? Later, Mark Lynas, the magazine’s environment correspondent, wrote a furious reply, Has Global Warming Really Stopped?
By the time the New Statesman closed the blogs associated with these articles they had received just over 3000 comments, many from people who had become regular contributors to a wide-ranging discussion of the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, its implications for public policy and the economy. At that stage I provided a new home for the discussion at Harmless Sky.
Comments are now closed on the old thread. If you want to refer to comments there then it is easy to do so by left-clicking on the comment number, selecting ‘Copy Link Location’ and then setting up a link in the normal way.
Here’s to the next 10,000 comments.
Useful links:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
The original Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs thread is here with 10,000 comments.
Looks like Peter Martin’s “savior” is ready to be confined to the booby hatch about now……..
Greens Give Gore 2 Thumbs Down: Gore’s climate ‘reality’ show faces strongly negative reviews from his fellow global warming activists
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/12848/Greens-Give-Gore-2-Thumbs-Down-Gores-climate-reality-show-faces-strongly-negative-reviews-from-his-fellow-global-warming-activists
I was awfully concerned to read the following, last night, on Think Progress Green:
Worried, I took the risk of using dirty fuels by switching on the TV – maybe the BBC’s News at 10 would have some coverage of the mass evacuations that might well now be under way, as Brighton and other seaside places are abandoned to the rising oceans. But unaccountably, they didn’t mention the subject at all.
Then I started to watch the video segment for Hour 19, on the internet, presented by sustainability expert Evan Williams, in the hope of finding out which areas of the UK’s coast are now disappearing under water, due to global warming. But after about 3 minutes, I started feeling sleepy, and despite the urgency of the situation, decided to go to bed, none the wiser.
It has occurred to me since that the Think Progress or Climate Reality people might have been slightly exaggerating. But that can’t be right. The project is called “Climate Reality” after all, so they couldn’t possibly be just making up stuff, could they?
Alex,
Considering the fact that sea levels are declining, it must be that the coast is moving further away from the population hence giving the illusion of a mass exodus. The fact of the matter is that the coast is abandoning the populous.
Sea Level Continues Its Historic Decline
http://www.real-science.com/uncategorized/sea-level-continues-historic-decline
Coldest summer in 20 years wipes out two-thirds of the common blue butterfly
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2038012/Coldest-summer-20-years-wipes-thirds-common-blue-butterfly.html
Recent 8 Months U.S. Temperature trend/decade – 10.2 F COOLER in 100 years
http://uddebatt.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/recent-8-months-u-s-temperature-trenddecade-10-2-f-cooler-in-100-years/
Hi Alex
I’m involved in Flood defence in the South. Each area of the UK has a similar committee working to an overall Govt policy which in turn is imposed (in part) by the IPCC through our signature on the Kyoto treaty.
This is very complicated as most of the land of the British Isles is either sinking or rising which confuses the actual rate of sea level rise.
Our sea levels are currently around some 30cm lower than in Roman times taking into account land change. I wrote about the subject here;
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/12/historic-variations-in-sea-levels-part-1-from-the-holocene-to-romans/
The full-and much more interesting version can be accessed in the third paragraph where the word ‘document’ is highlighted.
Over the centuries a great deal of land-especiallyon the East coast-has been reclaimed from the sea-(where land levels are generally siking)
The IPCC in effect forces Got agencies to add 30cm to any new sea defences in order to cope for ‘climate change’ (this remins so elsusive that latest information suggests levels are now dropping after a five year period (highlighted here) where sea level rise was tailing off)
Bearing in mind that much farmland is protected by defences now at the end of their useful life AND that substantial populations have moved to the coast and now need protecting, it is inevitable that with sharp cuts in biudgets farm land-and land subject to erosion-will be let go in a policy of .’managed retreat.’ This is accentuated by the various Nature bodies who wantr to see much greater areas of sea marsh.
I can think of no recent floods on the coast that are out of the ordinary and greater than others experienced over the last 100 years.
tonyb
@Brute, that item you linked to about the common blue butterfly brings home the truth that cold trumps warm, when it comes to wildlife mortality. It reminds me of an article, back in January 2010, by the RSPB (a UK conservation organisation not overly endowed with AGW-scepticism) about animal deaths during that winter:
@TonyB, many thanks for the link to your excellent document about sea levels (I saw this earlier, then couldn’t remember where it was, but have now saved the pdf for future reference.) You probably noticed that my alarm over Climate Reality’s claims may have been slightly exaggerated. :o) The east coast is an area I’m interested in, having spent my childhood years within half an hour’s drive from places like Cromer and Overstrand, and the effects of coastal erosion have been dramatic but indeed have had less to do with the slow rise and fall of sea levels than with the relentless action of wind and waves (here’s a web page devoted to the local history of Happisburgh, for instance, where houses and fields have been known to fall to the sea more or less overnight.)
The North Sea floods of 1953 are the ones that people remember, but here are some earlier examples of floods in the area that had they occurred in modern times would no doubt be ascribed to man-made climate change. Much of Norwich was under water in August 1912, as reported here (this was more to do with heavy rainfall than anything to do with the sea, but thought I’d include it), and in November 1897 a massive storm appears to have taken its toll over much of the nation’s coastline, as recounted here (with an allowance for journalistic inaccuracies):
I’d say you are right in observing that recent floods are nothing out of the ordinary. The only surprising thing, perhaps, is the sense of surprise with which these kinds of events have been reported, in the last few years, almost as if history had started sometime around 1974.
Follow the money: BBC exposed in biggest climate racket on planet
How did I miss this?
Tonyb, TonyN,
Has this been reported in the British press?
http://www.climategate.com/follow-the-money-bbc-exposed-in-biggest-climate-racket-on-planet
[TonyN says: That’s a very old story and there seems to be some confusion between trillions and billions. Nor would I see climategate.com as a particularly reliable source of comment on this topic.]
Alex said
“I’d say you are right in observing that recent floods are nothing out of the ordinary. The only surprising thing, perhaps, is the sense of surprise with which these kinds of events have been reported, in the last few years, almost as if history had started sometime around 1974.”
I think History ceased to be taught comprehensively and coherenty around about 1974. Our current crop of top politicians (all mostly educated since that date) are often shockingly ignorant about much of our history and Tony Blair admitted he didn’t do history.
The last Labour Govt cleared the Foreign Office of 500 years of treaties, agreements and other historic papers-some of them appeared on E-bay.
I fear that climate scientists are unlikely to be different to much of the general population and have no grasp of historical context. Dr Mann is a prime example in the way he trashed a thousand years of recorded history with his silly reinterpretation of climate history, despite havimg written records in abundance of the conditions that appertained in that period.
I think we have learnt to control our personal climate in homes offices and cars which has coincided with a particularly benign period of climate, and consequently anything outside of a narrow ‘norm’ is cause for concern-not helped by researchers who think that if somethimg hasnt been converted into digital form it doesnt exist. There is a treasure trove of climatic history in forgotten books and references.
The more I learn of the subject the more I come to the conclusion that disatrous climatic events are more closely associated with supposedly cold periods in our history rather than warm periods, which tend to be relatively settled.
The flood examples you gave were good so don’t be surprised if they appear in part of my series of articles on historic variations in sea levels :)
I am well on the way to completing Part two and it is evident that sea levels were also higher than today aroud the medieval period (which helped the Vikings sail up Europes deeper than today rivers.)
Tonyb
And now we have “Atlas-gate” (or “Greenland-gate”, if you prefer)…
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/20/times-atlas-apologizes-for-misleading-greenland-ice-melting-claim/#ixzz1YYqmgDNV
Oh well, they were only off by 150X.
Is this “par for the course” in climate science today?
Max
Steve McIntyre has an ingenious and plausible explanation of what may have happened with The Time atlas here:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/09/20/the-times-atlas-and-y2k/
But the real payload of his post is in the last paragraph: mainstream glaciologists, unlike the hard-line climate community, actually want to have a scare story corrected. And that’s a good example of how scientists should behave, but in sharp contrast to most high profile IPCC functionaries performance.
Perhaps it’s significant that the scientists who have turned the spotlight on The Times’s blunder are not exactly household names, though no doubt respected in their own field.
There has now been a surreal, comic-opera sort of twist to the Times atlas saga, in that James Delingpole’s satirical blogging on the subject has apparently caused some minor political ructions in the Maldives, as per this article.
Planet Healer Obama Calls It: In 2008, he declared his presidency would result in ‘the rise of the oceans beginning to slow’ — And By 2011, Sea Level Drops!
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/12910/Planet-Healer-Obama-Calls-It-In-2008-he-declared-his-presidency-would-result-in-the-rise-of-the-oceans-beginning-to-slow–And-By-2011-Sea-Level-Drops
President Barack Obama can take a bow. As Obama struggles with poor polling numbers, persistent high unemployment, the possibly of a primary challenge within his own party and a stagnant economy saddled with massive deficits and debts, one area where he can claim success is his prediction that he would slow sea level rise.
Obama — in similar fashion to baseball legend Babe Ruth calling his home run during the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series — called it successfully on sea level rise.
Obama declared in a June 8, 2008 speech, that his presidency will be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Obama’s prognostication occurred during his victory speech in St. Paul for the Democratic Party nomination.
Climate Depot can now announce it is official. Earlier this month, the European Space Agency’s Envisat monitoring, global sea level revealed a “two year long decline [in sea level] was continuing, at a rate of 5mm per year.”
In August 2011, NASA announced that global sea level was dropping and was “a quarter of an inch lower than last summer.” See: NASA: ‘Global sea level this summer is a quarter of an inch lower than last summer’
The global drop in sea level followed NASA’s announcement that sea level around the U.S. was declining in February 2011.
Most surprising, despite the fact that Obama only said he would only “slow” the rise of the oceans, his presidency has presided over what some scientists are terming an “historic decline” in global sea levels. Obama appears to have underestimated his own powers to alter sea level.
Even more impressive for President Obama is the fact that just six months into his presidency, sea level started its historic reversal. In July 2009, sea level was already showing a “slowdown and was “still flattening.” See: Sea Level Rise: An Update Shows a Slowdown & See: Global Sea Level Updated at UC – still flattening’
President Obama’s success in lowering sea level has not gone unnoticed. The skeptical website Real Science, made sarcastic note of Obama’s “healing of the climate” and his sea level accomplishment on June 3, 2011.
“No hurricanes have struck the US since Obama became president, temperatures and sea level have dropped, and we have had record snow,” Real Science noted. “Reservoirs are filling up – and all of the damage [President George W.] Bush did to the climate has been healed. Obama should declare ‘mission accomplished’ and take credit!” Real Science concluded.
Can Obama control the Earth’s Thermostat Next?
Brute
All I can say to your #4312 is WOW!
Max
Firstly – Brute, would it be possible, please, to petition the Great Planet Healer to turn down his healing powers just a notch or two, this coming winter? Just to make it a tad less freezing than last year and the year before? Thanks! Amen.
On another note – this morning, the managing director of Collins Geo, imprint of HarperCollins which publishes the Times Atlas of recent Greenland error fame, was on the radio with some (kind of) explanations. The audio is here, and I’ve typed up a transcript here.
Alex,
I’ll ask him after I receive a 6 figure cheque from you made payable to “the healer’s” re-election campaign (tax deductable of course).
An alternative would be to cut a cheque to fund one of “the healer’s” “green” subsidiary companies (Solyndra would be acceptable).
Typical Pay to Play: ABC News Breaks Obama P2P Scandal
http://romanticpoet.wordpress.com/tag/obama-solyndra-pay-to-play-scheme/
LightSquared: The next Obama pay-for-play morass?
http://michellemalkin.com/2011/09/15/lightsquared-the-next-obama-pay-for-play-morass/
Alex:
I caught only the last few sentences of The Times Atlas report as I drove out of the gate yesterday morning. Your transcript is fascinating, not least because Sheena Barclay’s idea of providing an explanation sounds so much like Rebekah Brooks in full defensive mode to me. This is not surprising really.
One of my first jobs was working for William Collins when that firm was a very large and well respected reference book publisher with profitable, but far less distinguished, fiction and non-fiction lists. My boss was Jan Collins, a fifth generation member of the founding family and, as the eldest son, chairman-in-waiting. He hated publishing and was useless at it, but loved hands-on farming which I understand he was extremely good at.
When the mantle eventually fell to Jan he sold his shares to one Rupert Murdoch enabling a takeover, and so far as I know farmed happily ever after. Later there was a merger with Harper.
So both The Times and HarperCollins are part of the ‘evil empire’. Is this significant or newsworthy? I don’t know, but I’m surprised as hell that the the blogosphere and the media aren’t making the connection.
@Tony, in fact the BBC’s Richard Black did mention the News Corp connection in an article, a few days ago; however, I think he and similar commentators will gain only a limited amount of capital out of this. That another Murdoch publishing outfit has been embarrassed would be on the plus side for them. However, the fact that it has also been another exposure of exaggerated claims about global warming would offset this benefit, somewhat. If the Times Atlas had gone in the opposite direction and overstated Greenland’s ice cover, let’s say, and this had been picked up by scientists, I suspect the News Corp connection might have been greater emphasised, and the tone I think would have been different.
In connection with this story, here’s the transcript of an ITN news item from earlier this month, featuring Sir Brian Hoskins (h/t Steve McIntyre and Climate Audit):
TonyN,
You’ve written “But the real payload of his post is in the last paragraph: mainstream glaciologists, unlike the hard-line climate community, actually want to have a scare story corrected. And that’s a good example of how scientists should behave, but in sharp contrast to most high profile IPCC functionaries performance.”
So the implication here is that there is a divide between those who say, quite rightly, that the Times Atlas should be corrected, and those who say AGW is a problem which needs to be addressed?
One name which came up prominently in the criticism was Liz Morris of SPRI:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/09/atlas-shrugged-outraged-glaciologists.html?ref=hp
I must say I’ve never heard of her previously. Could she become famous as the UK’s most prominent climate sceptic? Let’s see what else she has to say:
‘ Morris explained in detail how the size of the Arctic’s frozen mass has been rapidly shrinking due to global warming and an increase in glacial melting right across its surface.’
‘Even though we are experiencing the cooler La Niña climate cycle, we have still recorded five record temperatures in the past two years. As we move from La Niña to the warmer El Niño, Morris predicted record temperatures across the globe.’
http://www.soci.org/News/Cambridge-arctic
Oh dear! She doesn’t sound to be your type at all!
But never mind, maybe you mean someone else?
[TonyN says: I’m sure that all makes sense to you.]
Alex:
I also remember problems with atlas’s from my time at Collins, including one that had to be either recalled or amended. There was something approaching a diplomatic incident because of the position of an international boarder in the Middle East or Africa: I don’t recall which. Collins was eventually accused of giving in to diplomatic pressure.
So far as the Murdoch empire is concerned, it is the unwillingness to just say ‘We screwed up”, close the story down, and move on, that seems to be so typical of the corporate ethos. I wonder what impact the publlicity will have on sales? Certainly a hell of a lot of peolpe will know about the Times Atlas who would never have heard of it before, and although the editioin in quetion costs £150, so far as I know there is still a concise edition at a much more moderate price.
Hello everyone. I haven’t had much to say on climate lately as I have been engrossed with our impending western financial collapse. Its hard to know where to start to try and put in perspective just how perilous is the situation in Europe. Yet we see the cogs of the unelected EU working desperately to fix everything by “willing” to to be fixed.
The same bone headed thinking that has bought us all the ruinous policy responses to climate change is being applied now to saving the Euro. So we know absolutely they will fail. I’m afraid to say the Euro is finished, and with it any hope we have of economic growth out of the mire we are in.
The positive we can look forward to is, as I have been saying for some time, the money has run out! How can this be a positive? It will force a change of direction and policy on a wide variety of matters that under normal business as usual conditions we will never see happen.
We still have some groups of politicians and commentators calling for measures to stimulate growth by spending, but it surely must soon sink in that this will not work, and has not worked in the last 4 years, and in fact has never worked long term.
There is a great work by Obourne and Weaver called the Guilty Men that may become the reference work for the era. James Dellingpole comments on it here
What happens in the immediate future? I don’t know. This is partly because my imagination just can not comprehend how stupid the political classes are. One thing is I don’t think we will see a repudiation of global warming or climate change, at least not in Europe, but rather it will be used by the stupid to try and gain favour with a group of the electorate that is shrinking by the day. But I’m sure we will not see all the planed wind turbines built as raising the cash to build them in the face of the uncertainty that the subsidies will service will be extremely difficult.
We will have a change of government before the 5 year term of the coalition. The Lib Dims have been wrong on just about everything, and in those areas such as liberty and freedom that they champion they have not done anything of substance, proving that having power is more important to them than what you actually do. Cameron, Osbourne and their cronies are just as bad.
What would I do? One word “carrots”
@Tony, re your experiences working for Collins in earlier days, it’s quite striking how the character of an organisation will change over time, and when its leaders or sponsors change. For example, Jethro Lennox, who is now senior editor of the Times Atlas, seems (to me, anyway) to have a distinctive environmentalist’s perspective of his work, as this article from 2008 suggests; he was also involved in the publication of Fragile Earth in 2008.
The Times Atlas has a channel on YouTube here, and there are video clips of TV news items from 2007, when the Atlas was last updated – one from the BBC, with David Shukman reporting: “Now the challenge for mapmakers is to try to keep up with the incredible rate of change, to our deserts, to the cities, to the ice sheets, and of course to our climate.” However, the BBC report actually focuses less on climate than it does on other environmental changes, such as the draining of the Aral Sea. There’s also an ITV news item from that time, which starts with a bit of a non sequitor: “Climate change is altering the face of the planet, quite literally. The new edition of the Times Atlas shows how natural disasters, human conflict, economic growth and some irrigation projects have sent mapmakers back the drawing board.”
@Peter Geany, re the unfolding debacle in Europe, I’m not sure I’d want to be in the shoes of former Euro enthusiast Chris Huhne, who I think is likely to end up on the wrong side of history if he heeds the green lobby and declares a moratorium on shale gas activity, order to get the UK “off the fossil fuel hook”.
By the way, I’m intrigued when you write “carrots”. Is that carrots, as in incentives (carrot vs stick)?
Alex yes you understand exactly what a carrot is. As do most humans. But not our leaders which is proof they are not humans and therefore we could do things to them without fear of retribution.
I see tonight there is some sort of push to recapitalise everything. Germany will again put up impossible conditions of austerity and “haircuts” partly to convince their own electorate that they need to do this. It will fail because it is the system of the EU with centrally driven commands that is failing. They need to bite the bullet and let Greece default and fix the system. But I guess if they refuse to understand the fault, they will never be in a position to fix it.
TonyN,
You say ” I’m sure that all makes sense to you.”
Well, er, yes it does. But not to you?
Which bit are you having most difficulty with? I’ll see if I can make it a bit simpler for you.
Just as I mentioned above Germany, who’s banks have unloaded all their Greek bonds, now want all banks that hold Greek bonds to take a 50% loss. This is all to save the Euro and hence the great political neo communist EU. There is no democratic legitimacy for this. Yet another Trillion will be poured down the drain to the benefit of the ruling corporate, banking political elite, all paid for by those on low and middle incomes. And this time everyone must understand it is NOT the Banks fault. Politicians and regulators had required banks to switch their bond holdings to sovereign bonds as they were safe. Oh dear!
Just as we have found that the politicians have paid little heed to science in the climate debate, they are paying little heed to the financial reality of today. Our good friends at the BBC broadcast anyone who says that nice things about the EU and ignore the voices of caution and reality. Sound familiar?
And for those that think China is running the world, you are in for a shock. China relies on the West more than the shallow MSM would have us believe for its wealth, and we are about to stop buying their goods. They have taken our money but forgotten to understand they need to reciprocate. Watch this space They have a looming property bubble and rather than allowing their currency to float have held it artificially low. They now want us to consider them as a market economy when they are most definitely a command economy.
This is of interest to those who oppose wind turbines. Much of the manufacture is done in China in an effort to reduce the capital cost, and much of the technology has been transfered. But the Chinese don’t have the same understanding of making sure everything is correct to 10 decimal places required of some of the components, and a chat I had recently with an engineer working for one of the major European suppliers suggests that many of these turbines are not going to last the distance. The larger they get the more critical the gearboxes. Watch this space as they say. The whole China thing will come back to bite us, from many directions.
The world Bank and IMF getting in on the act of Carbon Taxes. This is why we need a revolution to get rid of the rulling classes. There has to be some way they pay for all the bailouts.