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.
Brute,
In principle CO2 emission control is no different from any other emission control. Sulphur Dioxide, CFC, smoke from houses and factories, smoking in bars and restaurants, even throwing litter on to the streets. Sure, we could increase everyone’s “freedom” by totally removing all restrictions but would that be beneficial to the community as whole?
What you are really saying is AGW can’t be a problem because any remedy would infringe on your personal liberties to emit as much CO2 as you like. And obviously any society that unconditionally puts the liberty of the one before the welfare of all is going to have the most problems in coming to terms with the issues involved. Your last post does show that opposition to the science of AGW is driven by political considerations rather than any concerns on the validity of the science itself.
TonyB, Reur 2223,
Thanks for your comments, including your reference to the diaries of Watkin Tench. No I have not been there but remember the extract of magnificent old prose concerning the bat (flying fox or fruit bat) deaths from heat, but what ‘perroquettes’ were remains a bit of a mystery to me.
ALL, Can anyone help me with the question: Does Bob Ward have any relevant scientific background on the matter of climate change? This would be helpful when I comment on the 2, October 2010 “Science Show”
Oh, but I’ve just found this article from “ABC News Watch” (For more detail including access to four embedded links, open: http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com/2010/10/slander-on-science-show.html )
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Slander on the Science show
ABC’s Science Show Saturday 2 October 2010 featured an interview between presenter Robyn Williams and Bob Ward under the title “Sceptics’ publishing record on climate”. The interview aired Bob Ward’s views about the quality of scientific research by internationally respected scientists Richard Lindzen, Robert Carter and Ian Plimer.
How does the ABC justify allowing Mr Ward time on The Science Show to provide an evaluation of the scientific work of Lindzen, Carter and Plimer when apparently Mr Ward, a Public Relations director, is not a working climate scientist, has no qualifications in climate science, and has no record of peer reviewed publications in academic scientific journals on climate science. The interview misrepresented the publishing record of Lindzen, Carter and Plimer who all have long records of academic publishing in the peer reviewed academic science literature. No statement about Mr Ward’s apparent lack of expertise or political bias in the area of climate science was provided by presenter Robyn Williams, misleading ABC’s audience. The obvious hypocrisy of Mr Ward’s argument was not challenged by Robyn Williams. A piece on The Drum might be appropriate, but space on The Science Show gives unwarranted credence to Ward’s spurious opinions.
While the ABC provided an opportunity for Bob Carter to respond to the allegations made in the interview, it seems no such opportunity was provided for either Richard Lindzen or Ian Plimer to respond to statements made by Bob Ward, left unchallenged by Robyn Williams. As such this piece lacks balance and contravenes ABC editorial policy.
It appears the ABC, The Science Show, Bob Ward and Robyn Williams owe an apology to those it has slandered.
Here’s what Roger Pielke Jnr recently had to say about Bob Ward in a post titled Empty debate and climate attack dogs: “Ward’s frequent efforts to reduce debate over climate change to tabloid-style mud wrestling is symptomatic of a debate that has lost touch with what matters. It is remarkable to me that an institution of higher learning such as LSE would hire a spin doctor to systematically engage in attacking reputations across the blogoosphere and letter pages of newspapers. ”
Once again ABC’s audience is left in the dark.
Peter #2224
Once again you have tried to put words into my mouth. Cite examples where I have said this;
“However, in an ideal world I wouldn’t have to battle away with climate change deniers who by their own free admission accuse climate scientists of producing distorted results designed to bolster the arguments for Governments increasing taxation.
Your ultimate argument will always be that the scientific data is crook or forged. Its difficult to argue with that so what’s the point? As you’ve also freely said “the ’science’ is simply a ’side show’ to justify the ‘main event’.” The main event being to undermine the scientific case by exaggerating the doubt and minimising the consensus.”
(Incidentally you still have to cite examples when you accused me of saying ‘whitewash’.)
Surely it’s perfectly reasonable to ask you- bearing in mind your background in physics- about your considered opinion on the effect of cfc’s and then have a sensible dialogue on the subject? This is a new study by a world famous professor with whom I have had correspondance so I have a particular interest in his work.
Similarly I would have thought you would be interested in the work of Scafetta, whether or not you agree with him-and I’m not sure I do, barycentrism is not an easy subject to study.
It is perhaps unfair of me to ask you to comment on things that you obviously know nothing about, like sea levels or the history of global temperatures. In those cases I do appreciate that whilst you might have an opinion you do not have knowledge.
Your continued sidestepping of issues would do credit to the contestants on ‘strictly come dancing.’ Your latest being your tiresome analogies yet again to the tobacco industry. What has that got to do with anything?
Similarly your attacks on our politics have also been shown to be wide of the mark on numerous occasions, which still doesn’t stop you believing that we must be extreme right wing neanderthals if we don’t buy into CAGW.
I’m not trying to corner you by referring to Cfc’s or Scafetta just interested in your opinions, but it seems that unless it directly involves Co2 as the overwhelming climate driver you are not interested in scientific debate.
Ps It would help if you were able to distinguish between the comments of myself and Max. I’m British and live in England; Max is Swiss and lives in..err…Switzerland. Whilst we generally agree on most things we have different ways of expressing ourselves.
Perhaps it would help if TonyN could introduce a ‘sound’ feature to help you distinguish between us? Max’s posts could be heralded by the sound of snow falling in a forest and mine by the sound of scraping frost off a car windscreen-an increasingly common sound here over the last few years :)
tonyb
Bob
I have always assumed these to be ‘parakeets.’ They were introduced to Britain from Australia 150 years ago and are thriving in some areas although the last couple of cold winters has thinned their numbers a bit.
tonyb
TonyB,
The blogs are full of this sort of stuff “In this case the “bedfellows” are climate scientists relying on politicians for tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funded grants to produce papers to lend support for trillions of dollars of (direct or indirect) carbon taxes to be shuffled around by the same politicians.”
Are you now saying that you disagree with these sentiments?
Bob
I know something of Bob Ward. You might find this short piece I wrote to be helpful.
” Bob Ward has had a chequered career since leaving the Royal Society. He is a Pr Man and activist. His knowledge of climate change is limited but his opinions are not. This is a brief biography; Also see the last comment.
This shows him moving to a co called Risk Management.
http://www.stempra.org.uk/newsletter/06_autumn/06.htm
Interestingly this co also popped up during this exchange
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1519
This about the co itself;
http://www.rms.com/AboutRMS/
But he had a short tenure there, moving here;
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/granthamInstitute/whoswho.htm
Well well! The chair of the Institute is none other than NIck Stern- climate expert (when he is not a treasury adviser preparing analysis of costs of AGW for Gordon Brown). Its a small incestuous world isn’t it?
Bob Ward is a considerable fan of Al Gore and wrote to him
http://www.researchresearch.com/media/pdf/Gore2685.pdf
James Delingpole sums him up well here, which seems to refer to the same show as you were.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100058818/what-on-earth-is-bob-ward/
Hope this helps
Tonyb
Peter #2230
Yes
Tonyb
TonyB, the green parakeets are very common in my corner of London; I often hear them screeching and see them flocking across the sky. Their numbers do seem to be a little down after the recent cold winter, but they appear to be resilient creatures and it looks like they are here to stay. Here’s a news article from a few years ago, with some arguing that they should be shot to protect other species, with the RSPB stating that the population was “at a worrying level” and an ecologist predicting that “the parakeet population would treble by the end of the decade if action was not taken”. Some of the arguments and opinions in this article seem… eerily familiar.
TonyB,
It’s good that you disagree with that sort of nonsense of course, but it would be better if you actually spoke up about it as it appeared and managed more than a one word sentence to show your opposition!
PeterM
To my requests to discuss the scientific merits of the dangerous AGW case, you wrote (2224).
There is absolutely no reason why the purely “scientific world” should not be an ideal world, Peter. I agree fully and would even insist that “all questions”, which relate to the science supporting the premise of potentially dangerous AGW, should “be answered according to the merits or otherwise of the scientific evidence”. Don’t you agree?
These could then tell us whether or not political actions should be taken or not,
Peter, first of all TonyB and I are NOT “climate change deniers”. We are both fully aware that climate changes all the time. It always has. TonyB has even written serious articles on this. It appears that you are the “climate change denier”, instead, by “denying” that our climate has changed naturally over the past 1300 years (and by supporting the discredited “hockey stick”).
Second, the “political world” to which you allude is never an “ideal world”. Nor would there be “distorted” scientific records in order to support a political agenda in an “ideal world”. But, alas, we are not in an “ideal world” politically, and scientific data are distorted in order to support a political agenda as the recent disclosures have shown. You are certainly not denying that IPCC has been guilty of publishing “distorted” data, are you?
I agree that there is no point in your trying to argue that there have not been crooked, forged or exaggerated data in the IPCC reports; the record speaks for itself in this regard. That is not to say that everything in these reports is crooked, forged or exaggerated, just that some parts clearly are, in particular several claims contained in the political “Summary Report for Policymakers”.
No, Peter, you misunderstood.To find the “main event” you have to follow the money trail. It is the trillions of dollars of carbon taxes, which should eventually result for politicians to shuffle around and dole out. And this “main event” is supported by the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funding for pro-AGW climate research (i.e. supporting “science”) by these same politicians,
I’ll ignore your silly and totally irrelevant statement about the “tobacco industry”.
Now that we’ve waffled around the topic yet once again, can I ask you to address the specific questions regarding the “science” behind dangerous AGW (see 2177, 2215 and 2218)?
Thanks.
Max
Several bloggers here are comparing the AGW doomsayers to parakeets. Is there anything to this?
OK. The AGW doomsayers claim to be “green” (are they really?) and so are (many) parakeets. But that is purely superficial.
Are there other similarities?
A treatise on parakeets tells us:
http://www.lisashea.com/petinfo/articles/bird_sounds.html
“VERY smart creatures”? I believe most AGW doomsayers would classify themselves as such.
“Thousands of members”? How about a “flock” of “2,500”?
This is interesting. Teaching a parakeet to parrot what you want him to say requires patience. Teaching a whole flock takes even more. IPCC has been plugging away at this for over two decades now. It has been successful with a significant number of journalists in the mainstream media, who are now chirping the taught message as a “warning of danger”.
It also requires that the parakeet be “interested in learning” (i.e. learning to repeat verbatim what it is taught to say). Can it be that part of this “interest” on the part of the MSM was financially motivated? (See TonyN’s blog on the “very convenient network”.)
As we note here, most of the parroters of the CAGW creed are, indeed, male (although it fortunately does not follow that most males are parroters of the CAGW creed, as this blog site shows).
“Young parakeets are the easiest to teach” (viz. various attempts to “teach” school children to parrot the CAGW creed are arguably more successful than trying to “teach” mature adults).
Finally, we have the parakeets’ low resistance to cold, which is also closely reflected in the reaction of AGW doomsayers to a cooling climate…
Food for thought.
Max,
No need to ignore my comments about the tobacco industry. 30 years ago, the argument was that tobacco was being unfairly linked to cancer, heart disease etc purely to justify ultra high tobacco taxes which politicians could then collect and “dole out” as you put it.
Fast forward 30 years and those pesky politicians need something new. So instead of tobacco we now have CO2. Whereas it was only a minority of the population who smoked, everyone is caught in the CO2 net. How cool is that?
That’s your fundamental argument isn’t it? Whatever its merits, not that there are many, it sounds rather more political than scientific to me!
PeterM
Not to distract you from answering my specific questions to you regarding the “science” supporting the “dangerous AGW” hypothesis, but this comment you made to Brute caught my eye:
Sorry, Peter. “CO2 control” is totally different from the “other emission control” you mention (SO2, CFCs, etc.), and the difference is “scientific” (rather than simply “political”).
First of all, CO2 is a natural trace element in our atmosphere, which is absolutely essential for all life on our planet. Over our planet’s history, it has been at much higher concentrations than it is today. There are studies, which show that increased atmospheric CO2 levels will have a beneficial effect on the growth of crops and forests.
CFCs are totally unnatural in our climate. How harmful they really are (ozone hole, possible root cause of global warming, etc.) is not certain, but it is certain they result in absolutely no beneficial effect.
SO2 exists in miniscule quantities naturally, but also has no known beneficial effect. High levels of anthropogenic SO2 from coal combustion have been directly tied to “killer fogs”, “acid rain” and pulmonary problems in exposed humans.
Exposure to non-disposed human garbage or untreated sewage is unpleasant and can cause the transmission of disease. Again, there are no beneficial effects.
So CO2 is totally different from the other examples you cite.
Just to clear your apparent confusion on this point up before we get into the discussion of the “science” behind the “dangerous AGW” hypothesis.
Max
Bob,
I think that the parequetes being referred to in the historic document are now known to us as budgies but at that time they were a new species (to the British) and would have been given a correct latin name.
http://www.petpublishing.com/birdtimes/breeds/keet.shtml
The creatures we are having increasing numbers of in the UK are these, the rose ringed parakeets
http://www.defra.gov.uk/wildlife-pets/wildlife/management/non-native/documents/csl-parakeet-deskstudy.pdf
Tonyb
PeterM
Stop flogging the “tobacco” analogy.
It has absolutely nothing to do with AGW and you are only using it as a “sidetrack” to avoid discussing the “science” behind AGW.
Be honest, Peter. You are fooling no one with this ruse.
Max
Peter 2234
You asked me a succinct question and I answered it in a succinct manner.
Perhaps you would like to formulate a reply to the CFC and Scafetta issues in an an appropriate manner, which would be more than one word. However, even that would be an improvement on the studied silence you have employed so far on these subjects.
It is the science we are supposed to be discussing here isn’t it?
Tonyb.
TonyB
The study on the “Rose-ringed Parakeet” in the UK, which you cited, gives some ominous warnings:
So in other words, it appears that hardy indigenous species frequently encountered in local pubs, such as the “Hairy-chested Nutscratcher” or the “Rosy-breasted Pushover” are not yet in real danger. But what about the rarer and more fragile “Fuzzy-headed Worrier”, frequently seen on university campuses or as “science” teachers in secondary schools?
Max
Max,
I notice that you’d only got about 450 weathermen, economists, geologists etc in your list of AGW dissenters.
The Creationists have put you to shame, they’ve got nearly a 1000 on their list of Darwin Dissenters!
I’ll not list them all here – but here is their link for reference.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660
Peter #2243
What on earth has a creationists petition got to do with anything?
tonyb
PeterM
No. If you look closer, you will see I only have 280 “qualified” individuals, including 220 “scientists” and 60 “meteorologists” on the list of individuals who have spoken out against some aspect of the “dangerous AGW” hypothesis. Not “450”, as you state. The “economists”, etc. have been removed from Inhofe’s original list of over 400, leaving only scientists and qualified meteorologists.
This compares to the fictitious “list” of 2,500 “scientists” supposedly supporting the “dangerous AGW” premise cited by Dr. Pachauri (only Pachauri never supplied the “list” – only the claim that there was such a number of scientists supporting DAGW).
As we both know (and he probably knew at the time, as well) Pachauri’s claim was pure posturing, and is irrelevant in any case, as pointed out before and as you now underscore very well, in comparing it to the “creationist” list.
My list simply shows that the frequently quoted claim of an “overwhelming majority of scientists” supporting DAGW (or a “mainstream consensus”) is also pure BS.
As I recall, you once made this claim, but I see you now no longer think it is relevant. (I agree fully that it is totally irrelevant.)
Whether “creationists” (your list) or “AGW doomsayers” (Pachauri’s claim), such lists do not provide any empirical evidence to support the hypothesis itself.
Back to the science, Peter (see earlier posts). Can you comment to the specific questions I asked you, which relate to the “science”, so we can get this discussion back on topic?
Max
PeterM
Please don’t let this distract you from responding to my questions to you regarding the “science” behind “dangerous AGW”, but here is another list, this time of “anti-creationist” scientists.
http://www.scq.ubc.ca/project-steve-889-steves-fight-back-against-anti-evolution-propoganda/
I can also supply you with a very long list of people living in New York (the Manhattan telephone directory), but let’s move away from “lists” and back to “science”.
Max
TonyB, Reur 2239. And Alex, Max. (parakeets)
Yes, it seems to me that the small parrot in question (your 2223) could be the budgerigar, although budgies tend to be in huge flocks in more central hot regions. This seems to be incompatible with the presence of tree-roosting fruit-bats, which inhabit the much lusher coastal areas. I’ve never seen a budgie in the wild, but plenty of fruit bats including thousands in cold Melbourne. There are very many small parrot species, that share territory with the bats, and here are some common friendly guys near Melbourne:
Left; Rainbow Lorikeet, (my garden) Top; Crimson Rosella, Bottom; King Parrot, although the latter might be pushing a bit large to be called a parakeet. The nearby park rangers don’t like us feeding them, but I find it too hard to resist.
TonyB Reur 2231
Excellent Tony; The Delingpole piece was rather strong and helpful. Also, although Ward spent time early on at the Royal Society, there is still no mention of him having any scientific qualifications; just a PR wordsmith it would seem. His association with economist Stern is also interesting.
BTW, please don’t spend time on it, but the link to Gore would not open for me…. I don’t think I need it.
Still no response from the ABC complaints unit about their skills resources relating to the complaint, which may alter the way I compose the thing.
Max,
You mentioned back in September that there was snow down to a lowish altitude in Switzerland.
Well it is not unusual to have snowfalls here in Victoria in October but they forecast today down to 500m, which is a bit rich. Also rainfalls of up to 100mm and flash flooding in some parts and road warnings today.
Seems like a day to catch-up on some reading.
Meanwhile, massive cuts to water allocations to farmers have been proposed:
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2010/10/15/3039023.htm?site=ruralµsite=murraydarling§ion=latest
Riverina reaction to the release of the Murray Darling Basin Authority’s Guide to the draft plan has been volatile and substantial. Between around 5000 irate farmers, business operators, civic leaders and communty members gathered…
Max, You say you have only “qualified” scientists on your list.
Anthony Watts is probably one of the most well known names on there. What are his qualifications?