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.
Peter and Max
I just read the link by Peter to Tamino who is another person who obviously doesn’t do history or delves too deeply into individual stations.
Here are my own Basel records from an as yet unfinished article on UHI.
Basel:
http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/D1053
Very built up area close to river in city centre
Basel is the warmest place in Switzerland north of the Alps. The average temperature is mostly 2-3 degrees above those of other cities. This is nice during winter, but during summer, the temperatures, especially in the night, can be rather uncomfortably hot. Basel is situated in the Rhine valley, and the heat is conserved by the warmed up houses and the surrounding hills.
Also much affected by wind direction so a change in these over a period can considerably affect the local micro climate and cause temperatures to vary against other Swiss records.
Very long history from Celtic then Roman times
20000 population in Roman times
30000 in 1755
Basel 166,000 people now 870,000 in Municipality
A weather station also present 11km away in Mulhouse which is sometimes substituted for Basel, although its climate is notably different.
http://www.google.co.uk/archivesearch?q=basel+weather+station+history&scoring=t&hl=en&um=1&sa=N&sugg=d&as_ldate=1850&as_hdate=1899&lnav=hist9
The link above contains a brilliant history of Basel with numerous weather references. Clearly the ‘heavy’ atmosphere in the expanding town caused problems.
“May 2, 1879 – On 2 May 1879, Nietzsche took a final health leave of absence from teaching, suggesting in parting that Basel’s weather might be responsible for his headaches: “abominable, noxious Basel, where I have lost my health and will lose my life.”66 Elisabeth wrote that she hardly recognized her dear brother, so exhausted and prematurely aged was he. Nietzsche finished The Wanderer and His Shadow, telling Cast that he knew mental effort would induce agonizing headaches”
Tonyb
Oh dear Peter!
NYT: Fears Turn to Doubts About Global Warming…
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25climate.html
Last week there was a debate in the Oxford Union on the importance of combating climate change. There’s a report here – probably a little one-sided but fun nonetheless.
Robin
There’s an excerpt from the Oxford debate at Bishop Hill. It sounds as though Lord Monckton was on good form…
James:
I daresay Monckton was on good form. But, despite admiring his ability to marshal the facts and effectively undermine opponents, I have to admit to a prejudice. I find him irritating: he seems to me to be rather pompous and over fond of himself. (Oh no, I’ve made an ad hominem comment.)
Max and Peter my #550
I have dug out part of the conversation I had with Max last year about Zurich;
“Getting back to global temperatures, you might be interested in the following graph as well-it is related to Zurich temperatures and is on the same template as Hadley. Zurich is another of those few places which have uninterrupted records going back a long way.
The first link goes to Zurich Fluntern data only, so it can be seen more clearly. The temperature change since the 1970’s-when Max said it had become urbanised is very striking-
http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/zurich_mencken.xls
This is the weather station in Zurich
http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/06660
that provided the data-you can scroll out to see the way the station has changed-back in the 70’s this was apparently a completely rural area. Not surprising, as Zurich has grown fourfold since then and engulfed the reporting station.
This sort of thing makes me very suspicious of the value of ‘global temperatures’
According to wiki (it does have its uses)
‘An urban heat island (UHI) is a metropolitan area which is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas. The temperature difference usually is larger at night than during the day and larger in winter than in summer, and is most apparent when winds are weak. …temperature diference can be up to 2.9degrees C”
As you can see it very closely mirrors Hadley until the last 50 years when it displays classic UHI effects.
http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/combined_mencken.xls
Fluntern is in effect now part of Zurich and is now the largest city in Switzerland with a total population of over a million including suburbs. The data from the weather station would therefore seem to demonstrate a classic case of it becoming marooned in an urban heat island and its current temperatures likely to be much higher because of it.
Historic note; James Joyce is buried in the Fluntern cemetery and Lenin and Trotsky took refuge in Zurich in World War 1
So winter disappears and temperatures generally are higher. As it mirrors Hadley so well I would suggest the current peak temperatures would otherwise be more round an average mean of 9degrees C. Less cold winters? Where have we heard that before?
“The temperature of the winter season, in northern latitudes, has suffered a material change, and become warmer in modern, than it was in ancient times. … Indeed I know not whether any person, in this age, has ever questioned the fact.” —Noah Webster, 1758-1843 (founder- Websters dictionary)
Phil Jones must have known about Webster because he said;
“Globally, minimum temperatures appear to be warming at a faster rate than
Maximum temperatures (Karl et al., 1993), particularly since the 1950s (IPCC,
2001), possibly associated with a change in cloud cover. Jones et al. (1999)
found no significant increase in very warm days in the Central England
Temperature series in recent years, but there was a marked decrease in the
frequency of very cold days. A decrease in the diurnal temperature range has
also been found in Northern and Central Europe (Heino et al., 1999)”
Tonyb
There’s a revealing article posted by Donna Lamframboise on her No Consensus blog. It seems the IPCC have been rumbled yet again. She refers to a research paper by David Vaughan about possible West Antarctic ice sheet collapse that was cited (several times) in the 2007 report despite accepted for publication 29 months after the IPCC’s January 2006 deadline – long after WG1 (where it’s cited) was supposed to have been finalised. That’s bad enough. To understand the IPCC’s even more serious failure I quote Lamframboise:
I suggest you read it all – yet another demonstration of the IPCC’s lack of professionalism.
Max, Reur 535 concerning the return of blatant censorship at RC.
Yes, it’s quite disappointing because I limited my first comment to the climate regionality issue, whilst avoiding the complexity of many other inconvenient issues, but alas my thought of having much fun over there has been cut short, even when I kept it simply to one point.
Apart from that though, I was amused to find that the Manna Church is apparently wanting to further delete the MWP via a semantic mechanism of “re-naming it“. It should now be the MCA, (Medieval Climate Anomaly); lovely!
It’s a bit like the way that some Christian fundamentalist creationists have moved to “Intelligent Design”, or some AGW churches have moved to “Climate Change”.
I don’t know if you have had similar experience in Switzerland, but ‘ere in Oz, (anche Italia), whenever I’ve gone to enquire of a bureaucratic adviser on an issue, and I don’t like or disbelieve the advice given, I’ve found that to repeat the enquiry later, to a different expert, the advice can be quite different, and more helpful. With this in mind, I’ll try a resubmission of my comment to RC, with slight mollification of the wording, and hope that a different moderator may be less critical.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BTW, I see that on ABC radio tonight, on “Late Night Live”, there is this topic, at about 10:40 pm local time:
123 new species discovered in Borneo. But, given the alarming rate of habitat destruction on the island, is it a case of 123 more species to worry about?
Philip Adams; the host, is of “The Church”. Could be entertaining, and I’ll let you know if it is
Robin (555)
I’ve not heard him speak, but I’m sure you’re right. Our upper classes are not renowned for their modesty!
H H Munro (Saki) described someone as able ‘to learn humility from a Duchess’, which must be fairly high up on the scale…
This caught my eye:
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V13/N21/EDIT.php
As one who spent some years around commercial glasshouses where CO2 was (and still is) pumped in to encourage tomatoes and chillis to grow, I think their owners would find the suggestion that they get used to it pretty astonishing.
Apologies if this is a re-post, but a decent balanced article
How the Science of Global Warming Was Compromised
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,695301,00.html
It seems those poor cuddly polar bears are doomed after all. The BBC has a story today – link – telling us about “a new study”. It seems that computer models (yes, those models again) predict that the bears face a “tipping point” (yes, that reliable ol’ tipping point) “at which point reproduction and survival will decline dramatically and very rapidly”. It seems these models are far more effective than going out there and gathering evidence which, surprise, surprise, is “cost and time-intensive”. Yes – and sitting at a computer is much less dangerous: big fierce beasties those polar bears.
The polar bear (probably, it seems, a recently evolved subspecies of the brown bear) has been around for around 100,000 years. It’s amazing it survived earlier warm periods. But, of course, there were no computers then. Perhaps that’s the real threat. Come to think of it: would there be an AGW scare without computers?
Robin, what’s especially ironical in the BBC article is that Dr Molnar dismisses the laborious “mark and recapture” procedures as leading to mere “educated guesses”, when the “mating ecology of polar bears” computer model does – what exactly? Yes, the model “estimates how many females…” etc… How is this not making yet more “educated guesses”?
Robin
We have briefly touched on the AGW movement as a “doomsday” cult over on the “Martin Luther” thread, but a continuation of this discussion probably belongs here.
Wiki defines a “doomsday event” as follows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_event
The doomsday threat from dangerous anthropogenic global warming is usually depicted as “a major disruption of human civilization”, although some extreme alarmists have carried the AGW doomsday prediction even further to an apocalyptical “extinction of humanity” (and many other species).
There is a legitimate role for apocalyptic thinking and literature in Christian theology (based on prophesies in the Bible), as well as that of other religions.
In a 2003 article by Gregg Easterbrook (A skeptical guide to Doomsday) the author writes:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday.html
The AGW doomsday premise suffered a serious setback in Copenhagen, when the doomsday prophets were unable to convince the majority of the politicians of this world that the doomsday prediction is serious enough to warrant drastic political mitigation action (AGW spokesman, Yvo de Boer, resigned after this major setback for the AGW doomsday movement).
From Nostradamus to James E. Hansen, doomsday predictions usually have three basic things in common:
· The doomsday prophesy is supported by scientific or pseudo-scientific arguments
· The predicted apocalypse is far enough in the future to be non-verifiable.
· The doomsday prediction never really comes true (otherwise we would not be here today).
This last fact is the strongest argument against any doomsday prophesy.
Yet this basic fact is ignored over and over again, as humanity falls for yet another doomsday prophesy, demonstrating that humans apparently want to have the threat of a future doomsday event.
Doomsday predictions have existed for millennia. These prophecies come from religion, oracles, prophets, scientists, or esoteric sources such as perceived messages from angels, guides, and extra-terrestrial beings.
Many of the religious or pseudo-religious based doomsday theories include the concept of human guilt for the predicted apocalypse. This goes back as far as the Sumerians and later the ancient Jews, with relation to the “Great Flood”, so it is certainly nothing new. The AGW doomsday prediction is no different in this regard
A psychological study entitled “Cutting down the dissonance: the psychology of gullibility” concludes:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-3.4/valhouli.html
This report goes on:
The perceived CO2 / temperature causation fits this category, although the statistical correlation fails upon closer examination of the CO2 and temperature records.
This is happening today, as both the atmosphere and the upper ocean are cooling despite record CO2 emissions. We are being told by believers in the AGW doomsday prediction that this represents only a “speed bump” in global warming, that the missing heat is “hidden” somewhere “in the pipeline” and that, even if it has stopped for now, anthropogenic global warming will soon come back to haunt us “with a vengeance”.
I am certain that there will be many serious psychological studies of the AGW movement, ten or twenty years from now, when it has been universally laid to rest as just another failed doomsday prediction.
But, of course, we shall have to wait and see.
Max
Robin Reur 562 concerning the imperilled cuddly white bear!
Computer modelling of said beastie’s sex-life etc! What ?!?!
Sheez….*@%^ >>> ARGHH! Look, pardon my “French” :-:-:-:-:-:-
Incroyabler murder!
One might think that after publishing such a ludicrous study that the authors would suffer career threatening ridicule, but I doubt it. Take for instance the second Catlin “research expedition”. (nuff said?)
Perhaps another way of looking at it is that the tax-payers money (?) for those bear-sex modellers, might have been granted more dangerously to those same academics for more serious research that might be taken with less ridicule. (so maybe it was better it was wasted that way?)
I was also “amused” by the presumption in the description of these two photos:
[1] Adult male polar bears gather near Churchill, Manitoba waiting for the sea ice to reform
Erh, the photographer can mind-read these bears? Three adult males in a social gathering without any irritability from starving consequent of lack of sea-ice? Hey guys, let us hang loose here and party whilst waiting for the sea-ice to return?
[2] A male in prime condition is spotted tracking a female
Erh, how can the photographer know the bear’s purpose to be such when there are no evident tracks for it to follow? The bear seems to be more interested in watching the observer; perhaps sitting in a noisy helicopter?
After seeing this sort of nonsense, it might be nice to have a special room in the house, that is padded and soundproofed, such that one could hurl ones self around recklessly and yell insanely without disturbing the neighbours.
I’m reminded that recently I was dragged along by a friend, to a foursome dinner with friends of hers that have caused toe-wriggling irritation to me on previous occasions. This time they came out with the same old crap, and it was such a relief when it was all over! We parted in our separate directions, and as soon as I turned a corner, I yelled at the utmost; ARGHH! Heads turned in the street, and Pat was apparently embarrassed, but boy, I felt better!
Robin, further to the cuddly bear stuff above, and your second link, this is a popular photo of a grolar bear. DNA test identified dad as a Grizzly, and mum as a polar bear
There is other stuff on grolar and pizzley if you Google.
Bob_FJ
Here is one you missed (565)
It is captioned:
Max
Max:
You say, at the end of your excellent post 564, “we shall have to wait and see”. Sadly, that’s probably true. But, while we’re waiting to see, we have to endure madness such as that reported on the front page of The Times yesterday: the EU says we must “cut emissions by 30 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020” – an increase on the 20 per cent cut already agreed. In all, this would cost EU countries £81 billion. We’re told “The European Commission is determined to press ahead with the cuts despite the financial turmoil gripping the bloc“.
As James Delingpole puts it here, ” … in the greatest financial crisis we have faced since the 1930s, our leaders are behaving like imbeciles“.
Yes, that’s a pretty accurate summary.
Robin
Yes, the Times on line article and the comment by Delingpole are interesting.
Times writes:
Times does not appear very enthusiastic, and it looks to me like Connie may have a bit of a problem getting her case through, in view of the current economic woes.
As usual, Delingpole has got it “right” (no pun intended).
Max
Max:
The idea that China, India etc. are going to be “inspired” by Europe setting these ridiculous targets is neo-colonialist nonsense.
Robin (150)
I believe in bygone days this was called “the white man’s burden”.
It no longer carries that name (but the meaning is still there).
Max
Robin (should be 570, not 150)
Robin
More to Kipling’s “white man’s burden” (from Wiki):
Substitute “cultural” with “ecological” (or “environmental”) and we have it pegged pretty closely. Note the point that we Europeans (whether we are physically located in Europe or in USA, Australia, etc. as ex-colonists),“have a moral duty and obligation to help ‘the poor’ [i.e. the non-European developing world] ‘better’ themselves whether the poor want the help or not”.
Is this more or less what you had in mind with your remark about “neo-colonialist nonsense”?
Max
PS Wonder what Peter thinks about all this?
Yes, Max, more or less.
It seems our EU leaders have noted that unfortunately we cannot hope to occupy the countries of these poor misguided folk any more and that, without our wise and kindly guidance, they seem to be developing some incorrect values – such as the absurd and dangerous notion that they can grow their economies and improve the lot of their poor people by burning fossil fuels. Therefore, it’s our duty show them – by example – how things should be managed from hereon. No doubt the scales will then fall from their childlike eyes. And, once again, the white man will have led the way.
I can only suppose that Peter shares that view.
Robin
It looks like we are doomed according to the latest release of the U.S. Energy Information Administration:
World Energy Use Projected to Grow 49 Percent Between 2007 and 2035; Rapid Growth Projected for Renewables, but Fossil Fuels Continue to Provide Most of the World’s Energy Under Current Policies
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/press/press343.html
Looks like the major contributors to this increase will be China and India:
Sorry to have to pass on this bad news, but thought you should be getting ready for the 6-meter tidal increase.
Max