THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS
At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.
This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.
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10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”
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No its not “exactly the problem” at all. Its not just Bjorn Lombard who is at fault with his costings such as “$685 billion” for the benefits over the course of a century. It’s a common mistake
“685” is 3 significant figures. No can be that precise over a long time scale. Its like predicting that the maximum temperature tomorrow will be 26.4 deg C for example. 26 degC +/-1 is much more realistic
The IPCC are much more sensible in that they assign a certain probability for climate sensitivity lying between two figures.
Sorry. Bjorn Lomborg it should be, of course, in the last posting.
Hi Peter,
You opined, “Incidently BL, or anyone else for that matter, is incapable of ’showing’ that carbon taxes are not the answer. There are too many uncertainties, for the problem to be analagous to a mathematical puzzle. He may argue for or against them but that’s not quite the same.”
Here is the reason why he has shown that they “are not the answer”: they will accomplish less than they cost. He has backed this up with calculations that make sense.
The bureaucrats and politicians that want to enforce these taxes have not backed them up with any numbers demonstrating that they are “the answer”, so I will have to assume that Lomborg’s figures are the “best we have”.
But even more basically: It is incredibly arrogant of the politicians and bureaucrats of the UN (or any other political body) to arbitrarily decide how much hard-earned money they are going to take away from every man, woman and child to support a particular cause, which they feel is in the common good.
The public should decide on what is best for the public.
Not UN bureaucrats, most of whom have not been elected by the public and many of whom come from countries where the public has nothing to say anyway.
And certainly not a bunch of “egg-head” climatologists who have not been elected by the public to define policy. Keep these guys in their laboratories where they belong.
The correct thing to do would be to tell the public honestly up front what it will cost them and let the people decide on whether or not a “carbon tax is the answer”.
You can be pretty sure that they will say “NO”.
Regards,
Max
Hi Peter,
You are splitting hairs when you say that Lomborg’s projections are ridiculous, while IPCC’s are not because of the number of decimal points.
This is an absurd line of reasoning, as anyone who is tuned into this blogsite has been able to see.
Sorry, Peter. Give up on that one. It’s a loser.
Come with facts (if you can), but not with such silly statements.
Regards,
Max
“The public should decide on what is best for the public.”
Yes of course. That’s why you are having election to choose a new president in November. I presume you are in the USA now rather than writing blogs at 4 am in Switzerland.
“And certainly not a bunch of “egg-head” climatologists who have not been elected by the public to define policy. Keep these guys in their laboratories where they belong.”
Watch out. Your anti-science ‘slip’ is showing!
Anyone interested in tectonic acivity in Wext Antarctica?
<img http://www.volcano.si.edu/volcanoes/region19/19_map.png
Enjoy!
Well I’ll not bang on about superfluous precision any more, which may just be a bit of pet cause of mine. I’ll just refer you to this link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
I’m not against what Bjorn Lomborg is trying to do, or his methodology, but it is very difficult. In his book “The Sceptical Environmentalist” he bases his arguments around the idea of successful economic development lifting billions out of poverty. As he correctly argues this has already been occurring, at least since the end of WW2.
However, it largely based on the premise of continuing cheap oil. Already in the short time since the publication of his book that has been shown to be an incorrect assumption. Consequently he needs to look again at his calculations. The twin problems of the need for an economic alternative to fossil fuels and the need to minimise CO2 emissions now have essentially the same solutions and I would very much like to read the next edition of BL’s book to see how he addresses the issue.
Damn! I just made a posting and its disappeared! I forgot to copy it beforehand.
Tony ,
Can you rescue it and delete this?
TonyN: Rescued, see above. The cause of false spam filtering seems to be linked to the rate at which any ISP is generating spam at a particular time, and not to the content of the comment itself.
Hi Peter,
You wrote (823), “You can predict the climate 100 years into the future, but not to 3 significant figures, for sure.”
Peter, if you cannot predict the weather of next year (as Hadley has consistently been unable to do), it is extremely unlikely that “you can predict the climate 100 years into the future” to any significant figure.
For a good treatise on why such predictions are rubbish (whether you call them “predictions”, “forecasts” or “projections”), I suggest you read the book “The Black Swan”, by Hassim Taleb.
This treatise is not specifically directed at climate forecasting but it fits there as well as for other long-range predictions.
The author points out that “epistemic” knowledge, i.e. knowledge, which is based on a high level of understanding of the subject matter, leads to epistemic arrogance.
All you have to do is read through the IPCC 2007 SPM report to find repeated examples of this arrogance: “understanding has improved”, “advances in climate change modeling”, “larger number of climate models of increasing complexity and realism”, “there is now higher confidence”, “very high confidence”, “there is an improving understanding…”, etc..
He points out that the basic problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know and that lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of their knowledge go hand in hand. Sources of uncertainty are underestimated or ignored. The longer the projected period becomes, the more the forecast degrades. The random character of the variables is underestimated or even ignored so that unforeseen events change everything, rendering longer-range predictions worthless. The “error rate” very quickly becomes much larger than the predicted change itself.
When predictions fail to become true, all sorts of rationalizations are made: the “outlier” is invoked (something happened that was outside the scope of the science), “hindcasts” are made in order to show that the prediction was “almost right” (and not that far off, after all) or that the model was right, but the game turned out to be a different one than was anticipated. How many examples of this have we already seen?
This is the basic problem with IPCC projections for the planet’s climate for the year 2100.
They are worthless.
Regards,
Max
PeterM 823, you wrote in part:
Peter, putting aside FOR THE MOMENT that you still have not answered my very simple repeated question in my 794/795/821, I will meanwhile respond to your latest diversion, in the hope that by you maybe understanding some nuances that may have escaped you, you may be able to twig what this is really all about.
It seems to me that if you ever read anything which includes words like “caused by AGW”, then you spontaneously agree, that it must be true. Furthermore, even if the event being described is teeny-weeny miniscule in the scale of things in our biosphere, then it is nevertheless proof of AGW.
I looked at your link #1 = (IT), so let me elaborate on my quick review notes, (As an engineer, with life-time coalface experience), that I made on the said Larson ice-shelf collapse of 2002
1) (IT) makes no mention of the mechanical forces or complex material characteristics of ice, that are inter-related in the MECHANICAL (physical non-thermal forced) separation of huge chunks of ice up to 400 metres thick. (~90% of which is non-visible, under very cold water, and…. Note: at the Filchner shelf, the bottom 80m is said to be saline ice, which freezes at about minus 2C.)
2) Instead (IT) introduces an hypothesis, (BWV 214.…worthy of more funding to explore), that fissures, (without any mention of their non-thermal origin), contain melt-water in summer, which somehow magically cuts through over a thousand feet of the ice, below sea level, like a laser! So what happens to that water in winter, when it gets really-really cold without any sun for 6 whole months? If the fissure is of significant depth, the summer sun will not penetrate down there at such high latitudes anyway, in most orientations! Laughably, that summer melt water, in contact with the ice, would probably be colder than the summer air above anyway, and have an insulating effect! Sheez!
3) (IT) gets more hilarious, with some horrendous statistics about the ice lost:
Area: 3275 square kilometers
volume of ice lost
~720 cubic kilometers
0.0024% of all Antarctic ice
one year of water for less than 7% of America’s golf courses
4) Even funnier is that (IT) has in an included image of this 0.0024% (= 24/1,000,000 of Antarctica ice) catastrophe, of an iceberg and only part of another from the Ronne ice-shelf, which although incomplete, must be well OVER double the size of the Larson calving, but which is not discussed in any way.
5) Let us compare the 1986 Filchner WINTER calving which resulted primarily from observed hinging about a fissure eventually widening to a 19Km wide chasm over a period of about 40 years: The calved ice broke into three large icebergs, named A22, A23 and A24. A24 was about 90 km by 95 km in area and about 400 m thick. So the forgotten A24 ALONE was of ~3400 cubic kilometres, or nearly 5 times larger than the Larson 2002 tragedy. The hinge fracturing at Filchner probably started around 1946, as a probable twice a century event.
6) Let us compare the tragic forecast for the Wilkins ice-shelf: According to the NSIDC image, (link #2), I eyeball its area per scale at about 1300 Km square. You said somewhere that it is about 200m thick, but let’s make it 400m. That would make it ~500 cubic Km, or going on 7 times smaller than ONE of three forgotten icebergs calved from Filchner in the WINTER of 1986
Do you have any thoughts on the above Peter? (links in following post to avoid spam delay)
Don’t forget my 794/795!
Tony,
Re 832/833,
I seem to have been spammed a short while ago with a post containing no links, (whereas 832 did have a link)
Could I suggest that whenever we are spammed, we make an alert post to that effect, and when you unspam it you delete the alert and replace it with the unspammed. Otherwise the post numbers may get out of synch if there are intervening posts by others?
Despite that, there is the risk that with several intervening posts, those scanning up from the bottom, to what they remember, may never see a post that was delayed by spam…… Ho Hum!
It is with a heavy heart that I report that the polar ice cap is still……..FROZEN SOLID. I suppose that we can just add it to the growing list of inaccurate prophecies of the Chicken Little Alarmists.
Can I get a tax rebate from Congress for wasting all of this time/effort/money on this nonexistent problem?
Polar Ice Check – Still a lot of ice up there
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/polar-ice-check-still-a-lot-of-ice-up-there/
Max: your post 833 is first rate. (Incidentally, I too am an admirer of Hassim Taleb.) But I would go further in criticising the IPCC “projections’. They are not based only on what Peter would describe as “the science” but also make assumptions about economic and demographic developments. To take just the first of these: I don’t think anyone would claim that long-range economic forecasting is anything but highly uncertain – and, to make matters worse, the IPCC’s economic forecasts are based on their “Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” produced in 2000, much criticised by economists and not even updated since 2000. So they’re adding uncertainty to uncertainty to uncertainly and feeding it all into a powerful computer (and the unreliability of computer forecasting is yet another uncertainty) and the results are being used to influence governments’ policies that massively impact countless peoples’ lives. Where’s the sense in that?
Max: correction – I was referring to your post 834.
Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png
C/O Greenie Watch……..
Another IPCC & Hansen FAILURE: Bangladesh gaining land, not losing it
Contradicting forecasts it will be ‘under the waves by the end of the century’. Name anything that James Hansen PhD, has predicted correctly.
New data shows that Bangladesh’s landmass is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of the century, experts say. Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh’s landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.
Maminul Haque Sarker, head of the department at the government-owned centre that looks at boundary changes, told AFP sediment which travelled down the big Himalayan rivers — the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — had caused the landmass to increase. The rivers, which meet in the centre of Bangladesh, carry more than a billion tonnes of sediment every year and most of it comes to rest on the southern coastline of the country in the Bay of Bengal where new territory is forming, he said in an interview on Tuesday.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of its food production. Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.
But Sarker said that while rising sea levels and river erosion were both claiming land in Bangladesh, many climate experts had failed to take into account new land being formed from the river sediment. “Satellite images dating back to 1973 and old maps earlier than that show some 1,000 square kilometres of land have risen from the sea,” Sarker said.”A rise in sea level will offset this and slow the gains made by new territories, but there will still be an increase in land. We think that in the next 50 years we may get another 1,000 square kilometres of land.”
Mahfuzur Rahman, head of Bangladesh Water Development Board’s Coastal Study and Survey Department, has also been analysing the buildup of land on the coast.He told AFP findings by the IPCC and other climate change scientists were too general and did not explore the benefits of land accretion. “For almost a decade we have heard experts saying Bangladesh will be under water, but so far our data has shown nothing like this,” he said. “Natural accretion has been going on here for hundreds of years along the estuaries and all our models show it will go on for decades or centuries into the future.”
Dams built along the country’s southern coast in the 1950s and 1960s had helped reclaim a lot of land and he believed with the use of new technology, Bangladesh could speed up the accretion process, he said. “The land Bangladesh has lost so far has been caused by river erosion, which has always happened in this country. Natural accretion due to sedimentation and dams have more than compensated this loss,” Rahman said.
Bangladesh, a country of 140 million people, has built a series of dykes to prevent flooding. “If we build more dams using superior technology, we may be able to reclaim 4,000 to 5,000 square kilometres in the near future,” Rahman said.
Bangladesh gaining land, not losing: scientists
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080730/sc_afp/bangladeshenvironmentunclimatewarming_080730134111;_ylt=Ai1fEIqHFVyfguECUfbGjKvPOrgF
I have posted a new article – which relies heavily on a literary quotation – exploring the relationship between urbanisation and increased public credulity where AGW propaganda is concerned.
The Prince, the traveller, and the universe
Perhaps the most important news story this week was the failure – after seven years of negotiation – of the Doha international trade negotiations in Geneva. It was certainly the most depressing. This failure to agree a reduction in national barriers to imports is desperately bad news for many of the world’s poorest people. After massively important concessions – especially the EU and US agreement to reduce subsidies to their farmers – it failed on a technicality. And a restart looks unlikely, especially as Obama seems committed to greater US protectionism. The reason for mentioning it here is that the stumbling block was a disagreement on a detail between the US on the one hand and China and India, the two emerging economic superpowers, on the other. It demonstrates just how much international influence these two increasingly powerful countries now wield – an influence that will be even greater in future years (see post 415), described elsewhere as the
All this underlines the enormous significance of China’s, India’s and other developing countries’ determination to make their economic success their top priority (thereby reducing their own levels of poverty, but sadly not those of Africa) – which is far more important to them than, for example, Western concerns about climate change:
As I keep saying, anyone who thinks that mankind will massively, or even slightly, reduce its CO2 emissions in anything like the timescale demanded by the (largely Western) AGW lobby and embraced in theory by (largely Western) politicians is living in dreamland – and the sooner that lobby wakes up to that reality the better.
Koutsoyiannis et al 2008: On the credibility of climate predictions
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3361
Hi Robin,
Thanks for your 839 about worthless long-range economic projections (IPCC SRES) based on equally worthless long-range climate projections (various GCMs).
Speaking of Taleb’s book, I especially like the many “Yogi Berra” quotes he sprinkles in, as well as the illustrations, such as Caravaggio’s “The Fortune Teller” (showing the fortune-teller stealing the sucker’s ring). I’m sure you would express this more eloquently, but isn’t that what these IPCC “fortune tellers” are trying to do to us? Hold onto your wallet!
Brute has posted a couple of eye-openers (837, 844).
First, another one-year climate projection (ice-free Arctic) bites the dust, but we should give credence to 90+-year climate projections of IPCC?
Believe the Koutsoyiannis et al study also cited by Brute gives us the clear answer to that question.
Regards,
Max
Max: re “projections’, here’s an interesting exercise. Assume that scientists and economists in the Western world in 1900 had available to them the most powerful and sophisticated of modern computers plus a simple means of inputting data to them (but without the slightest idea about what was happening behind the scenes). Then ask them to project how the world would look economically, politically, technically and demographically in 2000. How accurate do you think their answers might be? Yet that’s precisely what the IPCC claims to be able to do re 2100.
Great idea here.
Hi Peter,
You stated that BL’s book is “largely based on the premise of continuing cheap oil”, and that his conclusions on priorities are therefore flawed. I do not see this as a basic flaw in his analysis. His conclusions are just as valid with $120/bbl oil as they are with $30/bbl oil.
He simply points out that investing in “mitigating” schemes to force CO2 reduction is a bad investment compared to many other investments (which he again reiterates in his latest WSJ article, which was written at the time of $120+ oil).
He points out that these schemes will at best result in a reduction of the projected 2100 average global temperature of 0.22C.
I made an earlier calculation that we would have to reduce projected CO2 emissions from now to 2100 by two-thirds to achieve a reduction of 1C. And this was based on using the exaggerated IPCC assumed climate sensitivity at 2xCO2 of 3C; if we use a lower CS as based on latest observations on clouds and water vapor (see #741), this would drop to less than 0.5C.
Let’s assume with no “mitigation” CO2 will increase from the 2007 level of 384 ppmv to a 2100 level of 560 ppmv
And let’s assume the 2xCO2 sensitivity of 3C is correct:
Temperature will increase from 2007 to 2100 by 1.63C
How much will CO2 need to be reduced through “mitigation” in order to reduce this by 1C?
Using the same calculation, CO2 level in 2100 would have to be 444 ppmv rather than 560 ppmv, in order to lower the temperature increase from 1.63C to 0.63C, so this represents a 2007-2100 increase of 60 ppmv (with “mitigation”) compared to 176 ppmv (without “mitigation”).
This is equivalent to a reduction of two-thirds of the CO2 otherwise emitted over the 93-year period
As Robin has stated numerous times (starting with 415), “anyone thinking that emissions will be reduced to 50% of 1990 levels (or whatever the current “target” or “aim” might be), or indeed will be reduced at all, is living in dreamland. It’s not going to happen: we’d better get used to it, (and in 804): “of course, that’s a major reason why those who believe mankind will reduce its CO2 emissions are living in dreamland.”
You conclude, “The twin problems of the need for an economic alternative to fossil fuels and the need to minimise CO2 emissions now have essentially the same solutions”.
At first glance, there appears to be some truth in this statement.
Oil reserves are becoming scarcer and more expensive to exploit. Natural gas reserves will soon follow. Coal reserves will last a bit longer, but are also not without limit. Uranium reserves for nuclear power will last several hundred years.
So one could conclude that CO2 emissions will automatically be reduced in the future as economics dictate, so there is really no urgent need to install onerous “carbon taxes” or “cap and trade schemes” to “force” this to happen. Research efforts into new technologies that move away from oil, gas and coal in that order will occur for economic reasons with or without “mitigation” measures.
In other words, the proposed “solution” of “mitigation” (i.e. “forcing” the world to move away from fossil fuels by imposing a heavy tax on carbon) will no longer be needed to achieve the reduction in CO2 emissions.
So it is not true that “the twin problems of the need for an economic alternative to fossil fuels and the need to minimise CO2 emissions now have essentially the same solutions”, if you are referring to “mitigation” in the sense of a carbon tax as a “solution”.
This “solution” is not required to solve the move to fossil fuel alternates; it will happen automatically as they become less competitive with other alternates.
So let’s bury the “mitigation” boondoggle. It will achieve nothing at great cost (as BL has concluded).
Regards,
Max
Max
” I do not see this as a basic flaw in his analysis. His conclusions are just as valid with $120/bbl oil as they are with $30/bbl oil.”
If the price of oil hadn’t been vital to his analysis Bjorn Lomborg wouldn’t have assumed any particular figure at all. In fact, he argued strongly that the theory of Peak Oil was flawed and claimed that the price would remain stable at it’s then $22 per barrel for at least 20 years.
Why does it matter? Because, in economic terms what matters is the difference in price between fossil fuels and low CO2 alternatives. That difference is now much less than it was eight years ago and may disappear altogether in another few years.
Brute,
For once I agree with you. Yes it is rubbish to suggest that the polar ice will melt completely this year.
You just need to look at this NSIDC graph to see that it won’t happen for a few years yet.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/images/20071001_septembertrend.jpg
To them Andrew Watt’s know I agree with him too, I’ve made the same comment on his website. It seems to have been accepted! I wasn’t sure if it would be. You couldn’t have made a more obvious strawman argument though, but, for obvious reasons, I didn’t say that!
Bob_FJ,
I didn’t see too many question marks in the postings you mentioned so I’m not sure exactly what you need answering, but I’d say that you are confusing ‘calving’ with the collapse of complete ice sheets.
Robin,
You say “How accurate do you think their answers might be? Yet that’s precisely what the IPCC claims to be able to do re 2100.”
It’s true that no-one can predict exactly what will happen. No-one can know for sure whether the scientific evidence will be taken seriously, or if the environmental problems that face the world will be solved, or whether we’ll all end up fouling our own nest.
I suppose you could say it all depends on whether we listen to the likes of the Viscount Monckton of Brenchly or Dr James Hansen.