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.
PeterM
Back in 1501 I asked you what you thought of the democratic proposal to let you (who are personally concerned about the potentially serious impact of AGW) to pay a direct or indirect carbon tax, tied to your personal “carbon footprint”, in an act of solidarity to help “save the planet” from this threat, while (at the same time) allowing Brute and me (who are not personally concerned about the potentially serious impact of AGW) to invest our money somewhere else, where we feel it would be more effective.
In other words, we would all put our money where we think it can do most good.
Doesn’t this sound like a “win-win” situation?
If not, why not?
This is no joke, Peter, so please respond with your thoughts on this proposal.
Thanks.
Max
Max and Brute,
You’re both over-complicating the problem. Which is that atmospheric CO2 levels are rising out of all control and that needs to change.
Its not idealistic, its just a practical engineering assessment of what needs to happen to protect not so much our welfare as the welfare of our descendants.
If the sort of scheme you have in mind in your 1601 can achieve a reduction in either emissions or concentrations, it might be worthy of some consideration.
Well then consider it for 24 hours and let us know……..then put your money where your mouth is.
You’re the one that always proposes wagers……..wager on the climate. Send a check to the Chicago Climate Exchange if you feel so strongly about it. Send a check to Al Gore or George Soros.
Sell your house and move into a eco-commune….let us know how things turn out.
You won’t do it and I’ll tell you why…….you want everyone else to fund your whimsical “Eco-Utopia”.
Or is it something else? Possibly that you want to deny others prosperity and freedom?…..That you desire to steal property from others in order to fulfill some twisted, farcical concept of “social justice”?
As I’ve written before……you’re all hat and no cattle…..just like the rest of the lunatic Eco-lunatics that live in their McMansions and jet set around the planet in their private chartered jets.
PeterM
You think (1602) that we (Brute and I) are “over-complicating the problem”.
Not really. We are simply saying that there is no problem.
Atmospheric CO2 has allegedly been rising since around 1850 (real records only exist since around 1958), but this has caused zero problem to date, as you will have to concede.
There are also no empirical data to support the premise that this will cause a problem in the future.
You apparently do not agree with this assessment and would like to see human CO2 emissions reduced, in order to avert what you perceive to be a serious potential problem and “to protect not so much our welfare as the welfare of our descendants”.
I say, go ahead, Peter, and reduce your CO2 emissions, or (if you prefer) pay some sort of a voluntary “carbon tax” to atone for your carbon footprint.
Just count me out. I think it’s a boondoggle (as does Brute plus a majority of the inhabitants of this world).
Max
Meltdown of the climate ‘consensus’
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/meltdown_of_the_climate_consensus_G0kWdclUvwhVr6DYH6A4uJ
PeterM
Not to belabor a hypothetical discussion of a theoretical problem, but in 1501 you wrote:
We may actually be getting closer to an agreement here, Peter.
Let’s say that 40% of the population of the “first world” agree with your personal opinion that AGW has caused a significant portion of the observed 20th century warming and represents a serious potential threat for the future (while 60% do not).
So if this 340% (including you) would agree to pay a voluntary carbon tax based each individual’s personal carbon footprint, and in addition would agree to cut this carbon footprint by 50% within the next 10 years, this would be a start.
If truly implemented, this would reduce CO2 emissions from this group, but we are not sure about secondary impacts.
We could then see whether or not after 10 years this has had any real impact on our planet’s climate (excluding, of course, any impact of “natural variability”).
Then, if these actions demonstratibly helped reduce AGW and its purported disastrous consequences, we could contemplate “rolling them out” to the whole global population (not only in the “first world”, but including India, China, Brazil, etc.) on a democratically agreed upon basis.
If they achieved no real change, we could blow off the whole deal.
This would be a democratic approach, which (if your assumption on AGW is correct) could “achieve something”.
Sound OK to you?
Max
PeterM
Correction: Should be your “1603” (not “1501”)
Geoff, Reur 1175/Pg#8.
You discussed the case of astronomer Halton Arp and his excommunication from his church for arguing against the red-shift theory and supporting a steady-state universe.
Earlier I had written that I’d finished reading Ginenthal’s book on Sagan versus V, but that was not totally true. There was a small final chapter entitled: “Conclusions” which I put down whilst misunderstanding the sense in which the title word was used. I’ve just returned to it and find it contains some interesting entirely new discussions, including the following pages, with a similar story on heretic Hannes Alfven
Incidentally, I heard on radio that in his new book, Hawkins has gone away from the idea that God may have chosen when and how to do the big bang, and that it was all to do with physical laws. (that have yet to be identified.)
If no picture in 1608, please click: (and zoom if necessary)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26175880@N05/4952651351/
Bob#1573 &1608
I don’t see why TonyN should pull the plug. the way the scientific establishment tried to censor and then ridiculise Velikovsky, and sidelined Halton Arp, is directly relevant to the Climate wars.
Arp, like Lindzen, can’t be dismissed as an ignorant outsider. Like Lindzen, he values detailed observation over mathematical theorising. When he found qasars in front of galaxies, he posited that they were not distant and huge, but small and close. Conventional astronomy, anxious to save Hubble’s red shift = acceleration hypothesis, are forced to invent more and more complex hypotheses (gravity lenses) to explain away the evidence of their eyes.
Alfven has been even harder to sideline, due to his Nobel Prize. His theory of electric currents pervading space is the basis of the “Thunderbolts” blog. (Space is a weak plasma, not an absolute vacuum. It has been calculated that 97% of all matter is in “empty” space). One of the guiding lights at Thunderbolts (and a brilliant writer, in my opinion) is the Australian Wallace Thornhill. Anyone interested in the process of scientific discovery, with its heretics and paradigm shifts etc, should have a look at these guys.
Poor Hawkins. What he has to do to please the crowds. Did you know the original Big Bang theory won the Vatican Prize for Science?
Brute, Bob_FJ, PeterM, TonyB
Don’t know about the UK, USA and Australia, but here is Switzerland the TV PR campaign for the upcoming Cancun boondoggle has already started.
We are told that the poor islanders of Kiribati are under severe threat from the relentlessly rising sea level (caused by AGW, of course), and are screaming for evacuation to Australia or New Zealand before they are all washed into the ocean. Pictures of inundated buildings (somewhere in the tropics) are shown alongside other shots of sad looking Melanesian locals.
Dire warnings tell us we must act now to stop this disaster.
Turns out it’s another scare-mongering myth.
http://www.globaleducation.edna.edu.au/archives/secondary/casestud/south_pacific/1/sea-level.html
Since the early 1990s, the “South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project” has been measuring sea level changes at various South Pacific islands, in order to help these island nations cope with any changes resulting from earthquakes, volcanic activity and rising sea levels. This project has been administered by the Australian Government’s overseas aid agency, the “Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID)”.
According to the write-up:
These records show that, instead of the inundations predicted by climate alarmists, there has been an average sea level fall at Kiribati of 11 mm/year, since the start of the project. Tuvalu and Nauru (two other low-lying island groups) also show significant lowering of sea level.
So much for another myth, which is now being spread around by IPCC to “sell” their Cancun boondoggle to the public.
You’d really think these guys would have learned a lesson from the lies, which were exposed on the Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African crop losses, etc., but I guess that is too much to ask.
When your whole sales pitch is based on half-truths or outright lies, it’s apparently hard to change course.
Max
A 2-day meeting on climate change financing, which is being jointly hosted by the governments of Switzerland and Mexico, is going on in Geneva, in preparation for the upcoming Cancun meeting.
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/europe/Money-Key-To-Tackling-Climate-Change-102071958.html
The new executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, started off with a bit of scaremongering to get everyone’s attention:
Climate disasters, (maybe) caused by AGW are good lead-ins, but it’s really all about money, of course.
Always has been.
Hold on to your wallets!
Max
Hi Max et al
I have referred in recent months to many places around the world that appear to have been cooling for a statistically significant trend (minimum 30 years) and thought you might be interested in my latest joint study on this.
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/in-search-of-cooling-trends/#more-630
This is the IPCC view on any cooling;
“However, the updated data shows only very limited areas of year-round cooling in the north-west North Atlantic and mid-latitude North Pacific. Over 1901 to 2000 as a whole, noting the strong consistency across the land-ocean boundary, most warming is observed over mid- and high latitude Asia and parts of western Canada. The only large areas of observed cooling are just south and east of Greenland and in a few scattered continental regions in the tropics and sub-tropics.”
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports//tar/wg1/057.htm WG1 (Please read full section for context)
Previously the IPCC had confirmed the only signs of cooling were in South Greenland and some areas of the tropics. This all seemed to support the idea of a generally (but not wholly warming) world, so I suggested to my colleague that it would be interesting to find if there were any other areas that bucked the warming trend, if so where they were located.
If records are old enough you can follow the ups and downs of a natural cycle. Depending on where you intersect it you will find either a cooling, static or warming trend. This paper was intended originally to find those in the cooling cycle which still exist despite IPCC’s assertions, but whilst we may find the idea of a natural cycle to be self evident it is something that the IPCC do not factor in to their climate models.
They believe the explanation for the current general warming can only be explained by C02 increase, because that is what their models are programmed to find..
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/SixtyYearCycle.htm
http://www.heliogenic.net/2010/03/26/scafetta-on-the-60-year-temperature-cycle/
It is intriguing to find the wave pattern to be still continuing to this day, and that some parts of the world (cooling) appear to run counter cyclical to most of the rest of the world (warming)
I am sure there are also longer patterns, for example there appears to have been a general warming cycle of around 300 years to date, (since 1698) on which this shorter 60 cycle old cycle is overlaid.
tonyb
TonyB
Thanks for your very informative post 1613. I would highly recommend that PeterM study it in detail to clear out some of the “IPCC cobwebs” in his head.
The recently posted analysis by Verity Jones clearly shows the strong cyclical trend in temperatures taken from several different locations worldwide, with an overall long-term slight cooling rather than warming trend at these locations.
The second study you cite is even more damning for IPCC, since it is based on the temperature record of HadCRUT (used by IPCC). The conclusion shows how IPCC has distorted the record to demonstrate accelerated late 20th century warming, which does not exist in actual fact.
This sums up the IPCC AR4 and SPM distortion on 20th century warming pretty well.
There is also the problem of early 20th century warming (prior to significant human CO2 emissions). The study points out that IPCC attributes early 20th century warming to primarily natural causes, while the essentially identical late 20th century warming cycle can only be explained with anthropogenic forcing included. (Strange!)
Your conclusion makes sense, based on all the data olut there:
IPCC does not spend much time discussing “cycles”, as these are evidence for a strong natural forcing of our climate, which falsifies the IPCC claim that most of the change in climate since around 1750 (1.48 W/m^2 out of a net total of 1.6 W/m^2) has been caused by anthropogenic forcing.
Interesting stuff, Tony.
Max
Max,
Haven’t seen any advertisments for Cancun. New unemployment figures came out today and a ton more people are out of work thanks to the socialist government in power.
Layoffs, home foreclosures, overdue bills and belt tightening are the concern of the masses, not how a bunch of hypocritical, elitist, over fed Limousine Liberals are spending their Autumn vacation.
If it’s at the Hamptons, they’ll be battening down the hatches!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11141730
I blame global warming…
Hi Max
Thanks for your comments on the new article.
The IPCC amply illustrate that we think we know far more than we really do about the climate. They do not even attempt to properly factor in the known parameters such as ‘cycles’ of varying lengths, let alone account for the random aspects of the dynamic climate system.
Climate science is still in its embryonic form but tries to appear to be a mature scientific discipline by believing they have fantastic data that allows them to express the climate in terms of mathematical formula.
To do this they need to assign a level of preciseness to aspects of the data they collect that simply can’t support this amount of precision.
For example, the preciseness with which we insist that a surface temperature has changed by say 0.326 degrees over 126 years means the data aquires a mantle of scientific certainty.
In reality we can do no more than say ‘it might have changed by anything up to a degree or so, or it may not, but who knows?’ Hardly likely to encourage more grants is it?
Whilst I find the level of certainty apportioned to surface ‘global’ temperatures since 1850 to be bizarre, that is nothing compared to SST’s.
These records are for the most part utterly haphazard and completely unreliable (due to methodology) and they are sparse in the extreme, especially those going back to 1850 or so. Water doesn’t mix well, so a cold spot can lie adjacent to a warm one. To interpolate data in a large grid cell based on one reading of one moving spot in 5 years-or more likely none at all in that grid cell so one has to be ‘borrowed’ from elswhere- is an extraordinary distortion of the scientific process.
Yet we have CRU making money by selling material based on this data.
Whether or not we can ever know how the climate works is debatable, but it is certain that our level of current knowledge doesn’t begin to warrant the sweeping statements that are made by the IPCC which impacts on national government policies, which affects us all.
They really need to examine the known cycles in much greater detail, temperatures, winds, pdo, AO, sea ice levels etc, before they make their pronouncements. Then they need to step back and try to get to the bottom of those more random and irregular influences on our climate that they don’t begin to understand as yet.
Tonyb
Hi Tony
I think you’ve summarized it pretty well.
– We (IPCC) have no real notion of what our planet’s climate changes over the past centuries have really been, and even less what has caused them. The uncertainties are so great that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn concerning anthropogenic impacts.
– The surface temperature record on land is essentially worthless, as a result of the many changes in station locations, station shutdowns, large areas with no coverage, urban heat island effect, impact of land use changes and poor station siting.
– The sea surface temperature (SST) record is totally worthless, due to the many problems cited earlier, i.e. worthless “canvas bucket” readings prior to satellites, diurnal distortions of satellite data, warming bias of expendable XBT devices until around 2003 (since 2003 the more reliable Argo measurements show a net cooling of the upper ocean, but the SST record still shows warming)
So we have the “mainstream” insiders making projections for the next century and determining costly “mitigation strategies” based on these projections, all of which is based on a global temperature record that is worthless.
How crazy can we get?
The whole thing would have imploded long ago were it not for the massive amounts of money involved, i.e. billions of dollars being spent today to build up a case for fleecing the public out of trillions through direct and indirect carbon taxes.
This staggering amount of money is being used to bamboozle the public with phony scientific disaster predictions.
But there is a glimmer of hope. Despite the obscene amounts of money involved to hide the truth, a growing number of skeptical scientists and others are beginning to speak out.
The “mainstream” group of scientists has been found guilty of data manipulation, exclusion of reports that do not support the “mainstream mantra”, exaggeration of risks and (in some cases) outright lying. This information is getting to an already skeptical public, which is beginning to look more critically for the real story on “climate change” (rather than swallowing the IPCC party line).
Thanks to dedicated individuals like yourself, who keep “rattling the chain” and challenging the “science” supporting the official “party line”, the hoax will eventually die a slow, agonizing death, and humanity will most likely move on to a new “doomsday boondoggle”.
Max
Brute
Your post 1605 with the article “Meltdown of the climate consensus” concludes:
The same conclusion was reached by Peter Taylor in his book CHILL: a Reassessment of Global Warming Theory, when he wrote of a “collusion of interests”.
It is truly sad that scientists have caved in to the pressure (and promise of funding) from the politicians and bureaucrats, but, unfortunately, it looks like this is what has happened here (“follow the money trail”).
Max
TonyB, re your #1613 – an intriguing (and unique?) project, and diggingintheclay another excellent and worthwhile blog to follow.
Re Cancun, I’ve had a look but haven’t found much so far. However, here‘s an article in UK local website, Bristol Indymedia (“Anyone from Bristol going to COP16 @ Cancun?”) The writer states:
“The international networking potentials of travelling to Cancun far outweigh the environmental impact of the flights we will obviously have to take to get there – IF after attending we get properly stuck in and work effectively post COP16.”
Someone comments: “Not at all ‘obvious’ to me why you need to take flights? List of freight boat companies at the bottom of this page http://wikitravel.org/en/Freighter_travel”
Now I’m curious as to how many attendees will actually travel to Mexico by freighter for COP16.
I came across this initiative to promote climate literacy on the NOAA website.
http://climate.noaa.gov/index.jsp?pg=/education/edu_index.jsp&edu=literacy
I’d say they’d have their work cut out with you lot!
PeterM
Thanks for link to US Climate Program Office writeup: “An Early Effort to Promote Climate Literacy” from NOAA website.
The “climate literacy brochure” sounds like a wonderful propaganda tool. Since it is directed at children between ages 5 and 18 (kindergarten through 12th grade in USA) it can be simplified down to the desired basic “take home” message without getting into any of the uncertainties and unknowns that characterize the fledgling field of “climate science”.
I’d say that any more-or-less educated adult with an IQ above 110 would find it rather shallow and one-sided.
Anyone who has dug a bit deeper into the scientific, political and economic issues surrounding the current debate on AG will find it worthless as a source of useful information.
Since most of the posters here fit the above category, I do not believe it will be very helpful.
But thanks again for posting the link.
It shows how crude and shallow the US taxpayer funded campaign to brainwash children really is.
Max
I found a programme on BBC Radio 4 last weekend interesting; it’s Farming Today, which was broadcast on 28th August (hat tip to commentator Phillip Bratby on Bishop Hill, who mentioned it.) The recording has now vanished from iPlayer, but I put together a transcript here.
Some things to note:
1) This edition is about the challenges faced when farming next to the sea. “Climate change” is mentioned three times, and “rising sea levels” twice; however, this is what happens in the programme: the BBC’s Anna Hill talks about the 1953 storm surges on the east coast, a Yorkshire farmer talks about erosion, Nicola Currie from the CLA talks about building offshore reefs to halt erosion, and a Norfolk farmer talks about salt water encroaching on his land when a protective bank was broken. The programme is framed as if it were about “climate change and coastal erosion”, but there is almost nothing to do with climate change in any of the reports.
2) “The great storm that devastated the east coast in 1953 inundated the coast here and raced inland. And since those storm surges, the power of the sea has been eroding away parts of the east coast of England.” Coastal erosion, just since 1953? Not true, obviously, but that is what Anna seems to be implying.
3) I had a look at the document “Why Farming Matters to the Broads” (mentioned in the programme) and it says on page 5: “UK Climate Projections 2009 forecasts the climate of the Broads over the next 50 years to become warmer and wetter in winter and hotter and drier in summer with an increased frequency and severity of extreme events. Sea levels are also predicted to rise by 6mm per annum during this period.”
I wondered where the 6mm sea level rise per annum came from, and looked at the project the document cited for this, which was the Broadland Flood Alleviation Project. The BFAP website states: “Settlement will continue over time and be made worse by sea level rise; officially predicted to be 6mm per annum at Great Yarmouth.” I couldn’t find out from the web site where it was getting this from, so I tried Google.
I found a relevant link in this online article by the Journal of Applied Ecology (which itself is interesting reading – it is about the erosion of saltmarshes, and the article concludes that sea level rise is not to blame for this.) Here’s a paragraph from the article:
And another:
So they’re saying that 6mm per annum is the “maximum predicted rate of sea level rise”; in other words, a worst-case scenario. Here’s UNEP 2003; my understanding is that the 6 mm per annum corresponds to the IS92e “high emissions” scenario (please feel free to correct me if I’ve got this wrong.)
Interesting then, that the “maximum predicted rate of sea level rise of 6 mm year” becomes “[s]ea levels are also predicted to rise by 6mm per annum” – the worst case scenario becomes the only scenario.
4) Also on my travels through the internet, I found this eye-opener from Marinet (Marine Network of Friends of the Earth) written in 2008. If accurate, it suggests that massive offshore dredging operations in East Anglia have an impact that puts sea level rise (even at the 3.2 mm per annum figure that FoE uses, which looks somewhat different from the local tide gauge figures used by the Journal of Applied Ecology) into the shade.
This was meant originally to only be a couple of paragraphs (honest!) but has turned into a bit of a ramble; thanks for your patience.
PeterM
Some good news, which I am sure you will applaud.
The UN’s new climate chief, Christina Figueres, says a climate agreement is “unlikely in her lifetime”:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-09/un-s-new-climate-chief-says-final-deal-unlikely-in-her-lifetime.html
Figueres was born in 1956, so she is 54 years old today.
The life expectancy for females in her home country (Costa Rica) is 81 years.
This tells me she does not believe a binding climate agreement will be reached in the next 27 years.
Figueres’ prediction probably makes good sense, since by 2037 we may know a bit more about what makes our climate change (and whether or not we can have any real influence on it, which today appears extremely unlikely).
While it is refreshing to hear, it is still curious that we hear this from the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
This lady sounds a lot more realistic than her predecessor (who resigned after the Copenhagen fiasco).
The take-home message: Don’t expect too much from Cancun.
As we say in German: “Ausser Spesen, nichts gewesen” (except for the travel expenses, nothing happened).
Max
“Climate change illiterate”. That’s not a bad term – it might be useful if the term denier causes some offence.
I’m not sure why. For example, you recently said “We are simply saying that there is no problem.” That’s what some patients say when told they are overweight, have high blood pressure and high chlolesterol. “You will have to concede” that “it has caused zero problem to date”, doctor, they say.
That’s why its called “denial”!